Social Implications of Data Sharing

A few weeks ago, Evan Henshaw-Plath was explaining to me his epiphany about 43people, where an aggregation of different services tied together by Social Networks was starting to look very compelling. He then said that the next natural step for the folks at The Robot Co-op was calendaring. If anyone knows about calendaring, it’s Evan, who started a calendaring company with Kellan Elliott-McCrea in a past life. (Evan, you need Purple Numbers in your blog. Everyone needs them, dammit!) Trying to find relevant event information works much better when tied to Social Networks. Folks are starting to recognize this en masse, and the industry is reacting accordingly.    (JV3)

In an ideal world, Social Networks wouldn’t be tied to a particular site. Instead, that information would be distributed, and users would control the distribution. I’d love to tie my Google searches with my social network profile at LinkedIn, for example. That’s not going to happen unless Google acquires LinkedIn, or unless there are specs and a culture for distributed data sharing.    (JV4)

The culture is the tricky part. For as long as I’ve known him, Ross Mayfield has had an email signature that says what recipients are allowed to do with that email. (The choices are “bloggable,” “ask first,” and “private.” I think “ask first” is his default.) That, my friends, is a link contract.    (JV5)

Andy Dale has been working on the technical details of distributed data sharing with his XDI work. XDI is hairy stuff, but it’s graspable. Recently, Andy blogged about the form that link contracts and data sharing agreements might take. Victor Grey has said many times that we need a Creative Commons for data sharing agreements — simple, understandable, reusable, and legally enforceable contracts for our data.    (JV6)

That’s just a start. What will the user interface for specifying these agreements look like? Will users pay any more attention to these then they already do to Terms of Agreement on web sites?    (JV7)

eBay, Skype, and Out-of-band Community Building

Ross Mayfield makes a really good point about eBay’s acquisition of Skype:    (JSU)

Pierre Omidyar once explained to me that one of the smartest things he did when starting eBay was to not constrain communication around his market — by publishing email addresses. He was suggesting to me that we open the Socialtext Customer Exchange, but the core insight is more valuable. Back when I was running a B2B exchange, this was considered a contrarian move. After all, it let buyers and sellers circumvent your transaction fees in some cases. But letting go of control fosters liquidity. Especially when you couldn’t possibly structure communications to fit all transactions. Today I would venture that most of the communication on eBay’s transactions are out-of-band. Other communities with emergent liquidity such as Craigslist succeed by enabling even further out-of-band communication.    (JSV)

(This doesn’t explain the valuation, but I’ll leave that to the analysts to sort out.)    (JSW)

This is a core component of Blue Oxen‘s long-term strategy to build a learning community centered around the field of collaboration. Lock-in completely defeats the larger purpose of such a community, and it doesn’t work anyway. The hard question is, what does it mean to be a “member” of such a community? With commerce-centered communities, the answer is easy: Transactions. For knowledge-centered communities, the answer is less clear cut.    (JSX)

BAR Camp 2005 Redux

Thoughts on BAR Camp. Yeah, yeah, a little late, I know. Less late than the rest of my Wikimania notes, though.    (JQX)

Many Hats    (JQY)

The most bizarre experience for me at BAR Camp was the number of people I knew from different worlds. My brain was constantly context-switching. It made me painfully aware of the number of different hats I wear, all in the name of Blue Oxen Associates.    (JQZ)

  • Purple Numbers guy.    (JR0)
  • Wiki geek.    (JR1)
  • Identity Commons contributor.    (JR2)
  • Doug Engelbart translator.    (JR3)
  • Usability guy!!! Obviously because of the sprints I’ve organized, but awkward for me, since I have no actual background in usability.    (JR4)
  • Pattern Language hat. I’ve been doing the collaboration Pattern Language dog-and-pony show the past few months, and some folks who’ve heard me speak on the subject were there. I’ll be doing a lot more of it too, so stay tuned. Patterns are damn important, useful, and interesting.    (JR5)
  • Facilitation / event organizer hat.    (JR6)
  • Nonprofit hat. The lack of nonprofit contingent was disappointing, but I had a good conversation with Ho John Lee, who’s done some great work in that space. (We were also both wearing our Korean hats, along with Min Jung Kim, a rarity at events like these.) I also met Phil Klein, a nonprofit guy who also participated in our usability sprint the following week.    (JR7)
  • Ex-DDJ hat. Some fogies, young and old, remembered me from my magazine days.    (JR8)

All this was testament both to my ADD and to the job Chris Messina, Andy Smith, and the other organizers did in only one week. Three hundred people walked through the doors over the weekend. Amazing.    (JR9)

Talks    (JRA)

The best part of the event was strengthening familiar ties and building new ones. I met lots of great people, including folks I’d only known on the ‘net. I wasn’t blown away by the talks for the most part, but some stood out.    (JRB)

  • Ka-Ping Yee did two talks, one on voting methods and another on phishing. Sadly, I only caught the tail end of the latter, but the Wiki page is fairly complete. I’ve never seen Ping do anything that I didn’t find interesting or, in many cases, profound, and these talks were no exception. (I’ll have more to say on Ping’s latest work in a later blog post.)    (JRC)
  • Xiong Changnian presented some interesting quantitative analysis of the Wikipedia community. I didn’t have as much of an opportunity to talk with Xiong as I’d like, but for those of you who have interacted with him, try not to be turned off by his bluster. He’s doing some good work, and he seems to mean well.    (JRD)
  • Rashmi Sinha and I did a roundtable on Open Source usability on the first night. Afterwards, we both agreed that we didn’t learn much new, but simply having the conversation and especially listening to a new audience was valuable. One unintended outcome: A participant (who shall remain nameless, but not unlinked!) complained about Socialtext‘s usability, which I dutifully reported on the Wiki. Adina Levin and Ross Mayfield quickly responded, saying they’re looking to hire a usability person. If you’re in the market, let them know.    (JRE)

I was so busy chatting with people, I also ended up missing a bunch of good talks: Rashmi’s tagging session, Rowan Nairn on structured data for the masses, and Tom Conrad‘s Pandora talk, which seemed to generate the most buzz at the camp.    (JRF)

Throwing Great Events    (JRG)

I toyed with the idea of doing a techie session, but in the end, the talk I should have done was one on patterns and throwing great events. BAR Camp was great, and as with all great collaborative events, there were some common patterns:    (JRH)

  • Food. One of the most critical and, amazingly, most overlooked element in an event. Lots of credit goes to Kitt Hodsden, who made sure there were enough snacks to feed a small country, and the sponsors, who kept the beer flowing and underwrote the party on Saturday night.    (JRI)
  • Introduce Yourself. The organizers borrowed the FOO Camp tradition of saying your name and three words to describe yourself, and they did it each day.    (JRJ)
  • Shared Display and Report Out. Folks did a great job of documenting on the Wiki and on their blogs and Flickr. BAR Camp owned the foobar Flickr fight.    (JRK)
  • Backchannel. I’m not a big fan of IRC at face-to-face events, and there were definitely times when I thought it detracted from the face-to-face interactions. But, it was there, and it was useful. It wasn’t logged, though.    (JRL)
  • Permission To Participate. Lots of Open Space techniques were present — again, borrowed from FOO Camp — like the butcher paper for scheduling sessions. Lots of this was also cultural, though. I think this is the hardest thing for folks who do not live in the Silicon Valley to get — the spirit of sharing that comes so naturally to folks here.    (JRM)

I’d do two things differently at the next event:    (JRN)

  • Incorporate a ritual for new attendees to make them feel welcome and to avoid clique-formation.    (JRO)
  • Add slightly more structure. Now that the organizers have done it once, they can use it as a template for the next event — for example, publishing the time slots ahead of time, and actually enforcing them, at least as far as room usage is concerned. Also, I like scheduled Report Out sessions.    (JRP)

In the postmortem, we talked a bit about what BAR Camp is supposed to be, and I really liked how Chris positioned it: As a model for organizing grassroots, free (or very cheap) alternatives to more expensive gatherings. I’m toying with the idea of incorporating BAR Camp-style alternatives to complement some non-free events I’m organizing.    (JRQ)

Jimmy Wales on Things That Need To Be Free

Thoughts on Jimmy Wales‘s keynote at Wikimania. Read Ross Mayfield‘s post for a more extensive summary:    (JN8)

  • “1. Free the encyclopedia!” Jimbo considers the English and German Wikipedias “done,” and he expects the rest to be complete in about 10 years. His metric is 250,000 pages of content.    (JN9)
  • “3. Free the curriculum!” Jimbo suggested that professors work collectively on free textbooks, which raises the obvious question: Would this be successful? Incentive structures in academia are heavily weighted towards individual achievements, and a group of professors may not have the diverse makeup necessary for a superior collective outcome. Nevertheless, I think there’s some potential there and that it would be a worthwhile experiment, especially for books at the grammar and high school level.    (JNA)
  • “8. Free the product identifiers!” I found this to be the most original of the 10. The so-called Long Tail is creating a market for product identifiers based on open standards. Jimbo calls these LTIN, or “Long Tail Identification Numbers.” This would be a great, achievable, bottoms-up project for someone smart who wants to make a big impact on the world. The timing seems right.    (JNB)
  • “10. Free the communities!” Jimbo’s basic point was that communities need to own their content, even in for-profit spaces (like his current project, WikiCities). This is the Blue Oxen Associates philosophy and our approach with the Blue Oxen Collaboratories. Licensing community content under Creative Commons is not enough, though. You need freely transportable identities, which leads me to a proposed addition to the list: Free identities! I’ll expand on this in a future post.    (JNC)
  • To Jimbo’s credit, the keynote was highly inclusive, even Wiki-like. Folks from the audience freely contributed ideas and critiques (Permission To Participate was rampant throughout the conference), and Jimbo modified his list on the fly. When someone in the audience suggested, “Free research!”, Jimbo responded, “You’re right. I’m going to make that number four.”    (JND)
  • Jimbo on business models and free content: “Everyone tells jokes, but we still have professional comedians.” He also noted that this line isn’t his, saying, “I steal everything, including my jokes.”    (JNE)
  • The most challenging suggestion was, “Free medical information!” In theory, this sounds wonderful. Someone in the audience (Florian) told an anecdote about a project in Austria to create a fully anonymized knowledge repository where doctors could share misdiagnoses. Jimbo suggested that such a resource should be available to everyone. The flip side of the argument to freeing medical information is that the content literally could be the difference between life and death. There’s a tremendous responsibility among the part of the authors and publishers. As Jimbo noted, no one is going to die if there’s an inaccuracy on the Thomas Jefferson Wikipedia page.    (JNF)