Brains Trust
I had a couple of good meetings last week with smart guys
who want to make the world more sensible. It's pretty amazing how universal
that urge is and how many smart people there are, especially among the bottom
98% of the people in the big-E Economy who do the heavy lifting.
Erick the Well-Read
On Thursday, spring smiled on NYC
and I met with Erick Herring at a sunny table at the Redeye
Grill, named in honor of the number of its
patrons who fly the redeye between the coasts. Erick Herring is the proprietor
of Lasipalatsi,
Finnish for "Glass Palace". He spent his formative years in Denmark
and Norway and speaks fluent Danish:
"During that time, he built the higher education
segment for NeXT Computer's dealers in both countries, ran a private
consulting practice, was the chief architect for the first Internet-enabled
library system deployed in Europe, built a secure, nationwide IP network
for the Aalborg University Library in Denmark, taught courses and lectured
on the Internet, network security, software development, and operating
systems, and served as a Senior Management Consultant and lecturer at
the Danish Technology Institute. Erick attended the University of Texas
at Arlington and Aalborg University Center in Denmark, is published in
English and Danish, and founded the Danish Java Developers Group (DJUK)
in 1996."*
. . . meaning he actually understands the
terms I fling around so cavalierly. Erick had quoted extensively from five
of my
little essays, so I wondered
if we
might
get
together. Sure
enough
he
was
headed
to New
York on a consulting gig. (Coincidentally, I had stayed
at a hotel 5 blocks from his Santa Monica office about a week earlier—life
is a karmic strip). Erick is the Chief Security Officer for Digital
Evolution, inventors of the DE Management Server. As I understand it,
it's like a firewall with a bigger brain that assists people in an enterprise
to safely engage open standards services without being exposed to security
risks on ports that the firewall doesn't monitor.
Erick knows there's a better way to run our society,
and is willing to help out with the Xpertweb design study. Aside from being
off-scale smart, he lives close to our code architect and deep thinker Flemming
Funch,
who's Danish! I'm probably spoiling the surprise, but I can't wait for Flemming
to pick up the phone to hear
a Danish greeting about tech rather than Havarti.
That's the good news. The bad news is that Mitch and
I may have to decipher tech notes that look like this.
Erick generally agreed with my
take on the Liberty Alliance
DigID initiative, as much due to its grand ambitions as its tech, which he
feels serves us better than MS PassPort. His greatest contribution to Xpertweb
may be
to ensure that our DIY DigID is actually useful. Under the Xpertweb model,
the risk is to the vendor, who delivers value before the buyer pays, as
discussed by Mitch in his Caveat
Venditor post. Since every Xpertweb buyer maintains a DigID file on
her Xpertweb site, the seller's site can require the buyer to pass an authentication
test at her own site prior to committing to the task or sale. Then the
seller knows that the work is being requested by the person who owns the
reputation on the buyer's site. Did that make sense? Well Erick says it
can be the basis of a Good Thing, and that's what's important.
Isn't that cool? Xpertweb code flowering under the care of
a couple of guys with Scandinavian sensibilities who believe thoughtful people
can live together in peace and prosperity.
Spiral Unbound
Stuart Henshall's
Unbound Spiral and
this blog have cross-linked a few times, so we met by phone on Friday. Stuart's
firm consults to organizations to get them to act smarter
by realizing they need to see their work as "serious play." The
operative word
is serious, not solemn, to correct how too many groups
approach progress. He must be good at it, if you trust the recommendations
of people
like Jay Ogilvy
and Gary Anderson, Chmn./CEO of Dow Corning. Actually, Stuart's insights
are about how to employ the fact that we trust those men's ratings more than
others.
He's been doing some deep thinking about the core value, trust,
as opposed to the general description, reputation,
especially in his "Identity
Trust Circles" post on March 24. As we talked I understood Identity
Trust Circles for the first time, and a very cool way to apply Stuart's
principles to Xpertweb.
Since Xpertweb users expose their transaction data as willingly
as we blog our thoughts, It's straightforward to find all the plumbers who
work in your zip code, or all the programmers in Bangalore who hack PHP-XML.
It's simply a matter of applying Google
APIs to find instances something
like,
<xwspecialty>residential
plumber</xwspecialty> and <workzip>98040</workzip>
<xwspecialty>web programmer</xwspecialty> and <skillset>PHP</skillset> and <skillset>XML</skillset>
There will also be RSS feeds aggregated up through the mentor
chain to find skills. Once you find the skill sets you need, they can be
filtered by average grade overall, last 6 months, by product, etc. We had
already envisioned all that, calling it reputation.
But Stuart
suggested that finer level, trust, by using an even more Googlish approach.
We each develop confidence in others through their blogs and acquaintance
and probably by how they handle their transactions. So Stuart suggested
that
we need to be able to filter ratings by who made them. How do the people
in our Identity Trust Circle rate potential vendors? How do other skilled
judges rate providers? For instance, what do people who write O'Reilly books
think of programmers? Stuart has provided an important insight.
Such filters are easy for any reasonably skilled
mentor to set up in a couple of hours. It also occurred to me that we might
also weight
opinions by location. For instance you might want to know–in a
hurry–how
people in your small census tract rate the local plumbers.
In his Identity Trust Circles post,
Stuart notes something that Doc has also been alluding to. There are a lot
of people working the reputation meme and providing the web services to
back
up their opinions. Technorati and Ryze and BlogShares come
most easily to mind, but there are others, like our gestating favorite.
This flowering wouldn't be possible if the Net hadn't progressed
beyond its basic protocols to the point we've reached: a permission-free
zone where anybody with an idea can launch a web service without a preliminary
buy-in by existing vested interests. This freedom to innovate is the third
leg of the Net's NEA stool: Nobody
owns it, Everyone can use it, Anybody can improve it. If the Net's open protocols
weren't in place
and agreed upon, we could never improve it with the more highly abstracted,
software-only, permission-free improvements, social software really,
that we can now imagine together.
Our primary hope depends on our shared imagination, freed from the limited horizons
of those who would manage us into irrelevance. As the ad says, we've already
got the shoes. Now Just Do It.
11:10:12 PM 
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