Eastbound
I'm on my way back to NY this Sunday night from LA, having met with Doc on Saturday and Flemming Sunday. I had spent barely any face time
with Doc and had never met Flemming in person. Flemming, "Ming the Mechanic,"
has
taken on the chore of rewriting our code, based on a new model he's
suggested, whereby each Xpertweb site will validate its own structure and
xml data, and a mentor's site will provide validation services to protegé
sites. It's an exciting and vital extension of the protocol.
Something's Coming
...is how Doc described
Xpertweb yesterday. Doc Searls is my blogging mentor,
having exhorted
me to start this blog as we held long phone conversations last summer
about Xpertweb and everything else. Maybe it was just a way for him to get back to
work. Saturday at lunch, Doc said, "Until now, you've had my divided attention," meaning
he hadn't really got his head around it until then.
It's interesting that I hadn't got my head around Xpertweb until I
read Doc's and David's World of Ends model. That was when
I saw that, like the Internet, Xpertweb is only an agreement, something like
this, with just
enough code to let the parties deliver on their commitments. The agreement
describes what a mentor does for his people, and generally how each Xpertweb
user will store and preserve and mirror shared data as a good citizen of
this protocol-based economic collective.
Doc's the infrastructure guy. He went into detail about the infrastructure
pluses and minuses of the Internet vs., surprisingly, the Local Area Networks
that preceded the Net. We take it for granted that our LANs will provide
file, print, messaging, directory, etc. services. To be truly useful, the
Net needs to provide all those services (and more, as with the web). Sure,
the file and messaging services are well established, but there's still no
printing service, which is the lowest common LAN denominator. "Why
should I have to fax you something? Why can't I print it to your printer?"
The Net needs some other services, that Anyone can provide, like the
critical but missing ID piece that Andre
and Eric
and Bryan and Doc and Mitch and
others
have been describing. I've suggested that the only way to really own your
ID is to host it as your own web service on a server only you control. And
that's the model for Xpertweb ID services. Each user's id, xpwid.xml,
is one
of
the
three
core
Xpertweb datasets, along with Productname.xml and taskname.xml.Your
ID file
provides
the usual datatypes plus any
optional
datatypes
you like,
so
subsets
of your data can be selectively exposed on any basis you like. Or not. Your
info, your server, your rules.
Doc described how the Cluetrain meme, "Markets are conversations" was received
by third world people who actually have those conversations. Freed from our
limited sense of markets we've never really lived, these free-market experts
embraced and extended Cluetrain's central point: markets are more than conversations,
they're relationships. People come together repeatedly in the market over
the years and so they matter to each other, ultimately more than the goods
and services they had come to the market to trade. It's a rich model that
we'd do well to emulate.
So Doc thinks we need a way to parse relationships, not just conversations.
We concluded that's really how Xpertweb can best serve, as a relationship
API.
The Mentor Thing
And that brings us back to the mentoring thing. Our world revolves around
mentorship, but our acknowledgement of mentors is so perfunctory as to trivialize
their contribution. Doc mentored me into blogging, which forced me to tease
these ideas out of their cocoon. Blogging hooked me up with Flemming and
Mitch who saw where their contribution could make a difference. Others are
coming forward.
In Xpertweb, advice and reputation and money moves vertically along the links
among mentors and their protegés as they invest in others' growth
and are rewarded for that investment. Work and reputation and money moves laterally
among buyers and sellers, point-to-point across the hollow sphere of their
world of ends. It starts to feel like a wireless mesh network, with signals
moving ad hoc where useful. Think of it as a cluefulness mesh.
As Doc said yesterday, it's a simple system when you break it down, but it
seems complicated for now. As I suggested in my corollary to the
10 WoE points, most of this stuff seems complicated until we can do it, like
trying to explain to your great grandfather about googling an ATM location
and driving over to squeeze cash out of plastic.
The logical extension of that sequence will be here when we are constantly
replenishing each other's plastic, rewarding each other for the skills we
enjoy using,
and bootstrapping each other into doing this.
9:48:20 AM 
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