Reader's Remorse
Jonathan Blocksom blogs his sugar-coated skepticism of the proposed Xpertweb
microeconomy:
Brain
Food
Britt Blaser's Weblog is my current favorite weblog. His post from Saturday
about corporate ethics struck a chord with me. As usual with Britt's posts,
I find that there's so much I could respond to that I write nothing, because
it would take far too much time to post a complete reply and a half hearted
one just doesn't do the original justice. Sorry, Britt, I'm still trying to
adjust to the fact that I don't
have to be perfect on the web. Oh, hey, since only you and my Dad are
still reading this, I'd like to say that I find the pyramidal nature of Xpertweb
a little disturbing. What if my mentor sucks? What if I mentor someone who
turns out to be a bozo, and for whatever reason I can't turn it around? What
about people who are fantastic engineers but have terrible management skills?
And are you, Britt Blaser, the alpha-mentor who will reap the 1% rewards of
all of xpertwebs workers? I've been meaning to email you better forms of those
questions but just haven't gotten to it. Some you've addressed but I still
have concerns. Also check out Britt's post on Common
Sense, and he's got some good
war stories too.
Aha! The well-documented Xpertweb gag-me-with-a-spoon reaction!
(Sorry, Jonathan, there are no secrets in the land of Blog).
I've been meaning to be more thorough in treating this most interesting Xpertweb
UI issue - the built-in mentor fee wealth/retirement mechanism, based on a multi-level
algorithm. But, since no serious script writer would even storyboard the guys
in Washington, I've been distracted.
Let's talk about something even more interesting - Money For the Rest of Us.
What if we just get together to wire money to each other without asking anybody's
permission?
Review
The Xpertweb peer-to-peer system automates
reputation-building.
Here's a graphic depiction
of a typical Xpertweb transaction.
Here's a list of Xpertweb-related
blogs.
Why Xpertweb's "Pyramidal Structure" Should Disturb You Too
Issue 1
Should the Xpertweb design include a wealth generation system?
It's an open question. Like all designers, we on the Xpertweb microteam want
to give our baby as many genetic advantages as possible. A key feature of
any economy is something called a retirement plan. Another word for a retirement
fund is money while you sleep. Every one of us works for
survival while we dream about money-while-sleeping. And we seem to agree that
our pension is A Good Thing, but we're not so sure about someone else's $multi-zillion
retirement package.
Unfortunately, one man's meat is another man's poisson. It's hard
to distinguish between a modest pension, a less modest one, all the way up
to Jack's beanstalk. From an accounting standpoint, there's no difference:
it's all money while you sleep.
All money-while-sleeping systems are pyramidal, whether it's
a modest union pension or a golden parachute. Money while sleeping takes a
little money from a lot of people and gives it to a few, like Jack Welch's
tax on every GE employee and shareholder. You can't take the same amount from
everybody and give it to everyone else to generate money while sleeping.
The Math can be easy: For simplicity, assume everyone in
your company makes the same income. If you want to retire on 80% of your (and
everyone's) pay level, You need to receive a payment from 80 remaining employees
equal to 1% of the salary level. Obviously, if you're Jack Welch, you'll
need 1% of a lot of employees salaries.
So the question is, Should Xpertweb devise a little tax on all
its participants and arrange to have it sent along to a few of them?
Issue 2
What wealth algorithm is the most even-handed?
The most open standard would be one that no one has control over. Now that's
never happened, since no one has ever proposed to distribute funds according
to a formula without a central accounting system, collecting from the many
and sending it to the few. (Somehow, of course, the few to which money is
sent always turns out to be the people managing the distribution system).
This is the trickiest part of the Xpertweb transaction tracking system. The
clue came from the open source phenomenon, where conversations about a problem
directly generate solutions to the problem. Since a central accounting system
was a non-starter, the solution was to depend on peer-to-peer networking to
respond to the algorithm. Xpertweb simply publishes promises
and actions and ratings of the actions by
all involved parties. If you don't take actions and/or don't do the publishing,
you're not part of the system. The six Xpertweb actions are:
- Do work
- Rate work quality
- Pay for work
- Mentor others
- Rate mentoring quality
- Pay for mentoring
Specifically, if money changes hands, it's because the receiver of the value
(as in shareware) rated it high enough that their promise to pay was generated
automatically. 5% of each payment is deducted by the payer and reserved for
the payer's 5 mentors. 5% of each payment received is earmarked for the receiver's
5 mentors. No central entity collects all payments for redistribution. BTW,
once reserved for fee payment, it's not certain that the money will be sent
to the mentor - it's up to the individual whose Xpertweb mentor script has
earmarked the funds.
It's even possible that an open-source multi-level algorithm could be embraced
by a transition like the one that carried Europe past its abhorrence of usury
to an acceptance of charging interest.
So the question is, By trusting users holding the money to distribute
the 1% bits according to a standard algorithm, is the Xpertweb algorithm even-handed
enough to get past the yuckiness response?
Issue 3
Are all multi-level algorithms uniformly yucky?
(Sorry to use a technical term like 'yucky', but precision's important here.)
Yuckiness is presumably in the eye of the beholder. The multi-level algorithm
is a compelling meme, and it has distributed a lot of money to people who
got in line luckily or skillfully. Of course, the managers of multi-level
systems have designed the accounting systems for themselves, so they manage
to change the rules the same way they reduce the commission structure for
unexpectedly effective salespeople.
The multi-level algorithm is so compelling that it causes otherwise reasonable
people to do things they normally wouldn't to people they normally wouldn't
hassle. It appears that the bug isn't in the algorithm, but in people's response
to it.
An Xpertweb transaction generates no money until the payer rates it as worth
buying. This value-first-money-later dynamic is the inverse of the Amway model,
which says, basically: "Stock up on way too much of this shit which
you otherwise wouldn't, and try to sell it (and our multi-level meme) to people
you otherwise treat nicely.
So the question is, Does proven satisfaction re-calibrate the
multi-level algorithm enough to make it un-yucky?
Issue 4
Every time someone gets involved in these schemes, I get hounded and they
get disappointed. And there's that white shoe, gold chain thing going on.
I can never put my finger on it, but these deals are complicated, impenetrable
and have way too many moving parts to be trusted. I knew someone who lost
$1500 in one of these deals once, but I never went to another meeting. Yuck.
So the question is, Will the Xpertweb algorithm be transparent
enough to allow us to trust its workings?
My purpose is not to answer the questions, but to point out the issues. But
here are the answers Jonathan Blocksom deserves:
What if my mentor sucks?
- Rate the mentor's mentoring as sucky
This will show up on your and his record and will automatically discount or
eliminate your mentor fee and will also suppress the fees payable by anyone
whom you trained using the Xpertweb persona which has the sucky mentor in
your lineage.
- Find another mentor
You may have as many mentors as you want. You may have mentors for different
specialties, like graphic design vs. HTML coding. Or for different locations,
if you like hands-on mentoring around the corner.
Only in practice will we discover how much energy partial-purpose mentors
will invest in part-time trainees.
We Answer Some Questions and We Blocksom
Jonathan Blocksom's questions:
What if I mentor someone who turns out to be a bozo, and for whatever reason
I can't turn it around?
- Join the chorus of crappy ratings so this bozo's bozo-ness
is part of his global reputation.
- Better though, at the first sign of trouble, suggest that everyone's
a genius at something and a bozo
at almost everything else.
- Don't mentor someone you don't value (your mentor
will probably warn you on this. Every mentor's grade is based on their
trainee's average satisfaction ratings).
What about people who are fantastic engineers but have terrible management
skills?
- Narrow your trainee's work product to engineering products.
Most engineers should be selling their terrific structural beam analyses,
not management consulting.
- Use the Xpertweb forms to manage business dynamics: automatic
reputations replace marketing; automated task tracking replaces project management
skills, automatic invoices replace invoicing.
- Mentor Tip
Everyone wants to be paid by the hour, but it's
hard to grade an hour.
Mentor your trainees to productize their time so they offer things
like:
<myproduct1a>Structural
Beam Analysis for a 2 lane, 3-400 foot bridge</myproduct1a>
<myproduct2c>Five-page static
small business web site</myproduct2c>
That way they provide a tangible foundation upon which to build a reputation.
And are you, Britt Blaser, the alpha-mentor who will reap the 1% rewards
of all of xpertwebs workers?
The mere presence of an alpha-mentor would poison the waterhole.
Everyone who uses Xpertweb tools to mentor someone [Level 1] (who then mentors
others [L2], etc.[L3], etc.[L4], etc.[L5 - last level]) is positioned to receive
a 1% fee from work done by Xpertweb people at those 5 levels, subject to their
mentoring ratings. Like everyone else who thinks Xpertweb is barely good enough
to be worth criticizing, I hope to get the best mentor grades I can in order
to have a nice reputation retain loyalty and get money whiole I sleep, but
after the sixth level, no fees are available to anyone, because the universal
structure is 5 levels of 1% fees, and the sender controls the sending.
Way before a single mentor fee is generated, the entire open source structure
will be better understood than this description. If the system isn't transparent,only
the white shoe boys will play....;-)
The Xpertweb Forms
The initial set of Xpertweb PHP-driven forms are based on an open XML data
structure, with no rules about how the data is collected or displayed. If you
want to use Radio Userland to generate valid XML RSS feeds that advertise your
URL, skills, product names, mentors, where to send your money, etc., then you
can do it that way.
You can use pure XML for output, to aggregate and present data if you like,
rather than the PHP-enabled initial forms. This presumes our favorite browsers
ever handle xml properly...
Our microteam looks forward to the post-design stage when it attracts the
attention of open source experts start designing tools good enough to make ours
look primitive. Presumably, they will use their own Xpertweb tools to sell their
own Xpertweb tools.
6:12:57 PM 
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