Musings & Meanderings

I’ve learned enough about the origins and early days of the internet, read enough about the principles of a free internet, to make me a firm believer in and supporter of open source. The difficulty, of course, is finding time to learn to use it.

As long as the internet remains free, it provides a means of communication, connection and enablement of free speech as well as free enterprise. As long as the majority of its users are free individuals, moreover, they will have the ability to use their freedom to protect it. In the early days of the net, and even fairly recently, this was understood and appreciated by most people who spent time online, but is that still the case?

Of the billion people online today, what percentage knows how to build and operate all the tools they’re using? 2%? 5%? That’s high, but the exact number isn’t important. What is important is that for the overwhelming majority, its ability to understand and become fully empowered by this medium is severely limited.

It is mostly the creations of profit driven corporations that have enabled the size of this population, and, as far as I can see, it is their agendas which continue to drive both adoption by users and most new development.

This is very much in the usual tradition of all development in modern history, industrial and technological, for it takes highly knowledgeable specialists to create new marvels of engineering or technology, and those specialists, by their nature, are employed by the highest bidders, who are invariably private and government interests. The resources of these large entities enable them to pay the largest salaries to brilliant programmers and developers. What is most likely to be developed, therefore, will not enable the individual or benefit society specifically, except through by-products, and, perhaps, or perhaps not, in terms of long term change.

Granted, there are as many new small communities, including not-for-profit, being built daily as there are social media apps, but the majority of these are created on specialized and limited platforms created by small entrepreneurial businesses for that purpose alone. Citizens for Clean Water in XXX City would exist whether they had an internet based community portal or not.

There is a fair sized contingent of socially responsible developers who contribute online tools for individuals and communities, and it has become the norm to offer a basic free version together with paid versions accompanied by more advanced features. These developers are running small business, which may or may not be profitable, but they are essentially a more sophisticated version of the website developer who built a portal for your small chain of local stores, and most are producing a limited community version of a narrow slice of enterprise software without a commerce component.

For any non-tech community or group of any size and complexity, however, the options to develop organically online are almost non-existent. This, I fear, is a factor which marginalizes the free internet to the extent that it may eventually exist only on the fringes, with the mainstream belonging to large powerful entities.

Perversely, it seems that the very developers who pay the most attention to their targeted consumers adhere to the principle that internet use should be mindless and painless, and as a result are directly contributing to disenfranchising the vast majority. We should be learning what we can do and invent ourselves here rather than waiting to be entertained and served, but even those of us actively desiring these opportunities find more obstacles than options to the pursuit of this desire.

eBay, in its early days and before it became a ‘big business’, was such an opportunity to a limited extent. Millions of ordinary, non-tech people joined in, bringing to the ongoing event a kaleidoscope of interests and knowledge, connecting as sellers and collectors, forming into natural communities, creating sole proprietor businesses, and much more. Many gained some technical knowledge, motivated by their new online activities. eBay was originally a platform, not a programming platform such as .net, but a human platform where not just the content but some of the activities were as much defined by individuals and groups as by the developers of the site, who followed as much as they led.

What online site is doing that today? Blogging platforms? Social media sites? The ‘platforms’ for people and their chosen activities are becoming so sophisticated as developers continually try to offer a better targeted product that few users will ever do more than use the basic tools initially provided. This reality is an argument for open source in itself, except that the complexity of building anything to meet and advance current uses and expectations is and will remain too big of a learning curve away from the vast majority of users.

There are any number of projects which could truly enable the majority of users more fully, but there aren’t any that I’m aware of which are a human platform (such as eBay was) as well as a programming platform, where the form and function is being developed in tandem with user activity. Releasing a social app, early and often, isn’t the same thing. The full human platform requires a range of human activity that includes wide varieties of both social and commercial enablement for individuals and groups. Personal and societal balance requires both. We all have to make a living as well as dream, play, and socialize, and we further become a rich and thriving society by contributing to the public trust as well as by taking responsibility for our economic roles.

Can such human platforms really be built? Only if tech and non-tech communities collaborate.

Can that happen? What say you?

—–
later…
Open Peer-to-Peer Design quoting Linus Torvalds:
“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.”

One of this week’s high points for me was visiting Tara Hunt’s weblog ::HorsePigCow::. Tara is a fellow Canadian, who is now in San Francisco. My loss, not to have met her before she left Toronto.

Tara is writing on the community roles we play. In her post titled Archetypes in Communities - The Caretaker, she profiles her own Jungian personality type, and refers to the ways in which interaction between people in different roles is an architectural component of healthy communities (my words).

I’ve valued Jung’s theories highly since discovering his work as an adolescent. This discovery was occasioned by reading that Carl Jung collected case studies of children who saw mandalas. I also sought out the definitions of mandala and learned that I had been one of the children who saw them.

In her second post the next day, Tara reviewed a primary list of archetypes, asking What’s Your Archetype?. Although I do agree that these personality types are more behavioral models than true archetypes, the work that Tara is doing in studying our roles in communities is most welcome.

Visit her post to find the url of a site where you can take a Myers-Briggs typology test to determine your personality type. If this sort of test interests you, check out the Personal DNA link in the sidebar here as well. Most tests such as these are far too short and standardized to give an accurate in-depth representation, so using a variety, and reading further about the various theories is the best practice. Understanding ourselves better is usually beneficial to all our relationships and interactions in life, too.

The understanding of communities, and the complex dynamics of people in them, is (imo) one of the essential steps toward creating online resources that address needs and desires we all have that go beyond personal gratification, that connect us to one another on more than a superficial level. I can also easily imagine a myriad of other online applications for more of this kind of mapping.

Go Tara.

In my earlier posts on Mahalo this week, I looked at it from a user and non-tech developer point of view. What I posted was essentially a personal review based on my interpretation of the way that Jason has been describing it. The term ombudsman definitely gave me the wrong impression, since it implies the existence of a community/citizenry requiring such representation.

This original misimpression of what Mahalo is, so far, sparked a strong interest on my part. It led me to think that, finally, I glimpsed the possibility of what I firmly believe many people would welcome, namely a public community where individual interests can connect, merge, and overlap with those of others.

There is a ‘community’ building Mahalo, in classic crowdsourcing tradition, which means mostly drawn from the .001%. Will that change? Possibly, based on drawing in students who always need a few bucks. That’s actually a brilliant little bit of strategy.

Mahalo may be more of a links directory than anything else, but the reality is that one of the most wonderful resources that most of us valued, before the marriage of search and marketing drowned a lot of them, were those fabulous link pages that so many individuals contributed and maintained for the love of it. In a way, Mahalo is aimed at rebuilding that sort of resource, to the power of 1000. I can even see this making a dent in the Joneser and Boomer markets, if the category development doesn’t end up skewing too young.

Looking at Mahalo objectively as a business offering, I’m making a bet that it will be successful, with success defined in the usual terms of adoption, eyeballs and valuation. It doesn’t have to take over all of search, or do unrealistic things such as displace Google, to be a winner.

Loser pays an “I was wrong” post. Any takers?

Madan Pandit of Textual Analytics Solutions emailed me a link to Rich Skrenta’s post on Mahalo yesterday. This afternoon I caught up on others, including more of Jason Calacanis’s, those of Dave Winer, of Dave Sifry, of Andy Beard, and even the amusing Valleywag outing of uncov.

The only post talking about any aspect of the user (and potential contributor) point of view that I took yesterday, was Rob La Gesse on the ombudsman subject. Rob contended that if an ombudsman is hired by the company, then that person has to be in the position to speak only for the community whose interests he represents, and, perhaps more importantly, has to be listened to.

To the encounter with Mahalo which I described yesterday, I arrived with the concept (after reading Jason’s blog) that the Mahalo content would be hand-built by and for the non-.001% of users. This naturally led me to expect that such building would be done, to at least some extent, by the 99.999%. The expectation was partly reinforced by the fact that, of the 20 or so searches I tried at different times, not one came up with a result. What I was searching were my own non-tech related interests and also those of other non-tech computer users I know (who all rely on Google). Knowing that I could contribute on a number of topics, I registered.

It seems that my initial concept of Mahalo, which envisaged a brilliant method of involving and identifying peak users in non-tech categories, who would naturally draw other users in each category, was inaccurate.

This 99.999% of the billion or so people with internet access seems rarely referred to as more than an undifferentiated mass by the .001%. They are, however, as different and individual as those who are in the .001%. More so perhaps, since even across the range of gamers and coders and telephony experts and social media-ites and entrepreneurs and investors, the .001% share a lot of common interests.

Other than marketers talking in broad generalizations, such as that a majority of online buyers are women (and a majority of techies aren’t), no tech entrepreneur I know of has considered mapping the majority in depth. Most start-ups target only a core group, small or large, based on a service or activity - a single need or desire to be met, and it was the idea that if Mahalo was for everyone it could result in the eventual emergence of a starting blueprint for a personalized global user mapping, that made me think it was brilliant.

Such a map will not emerge using current marketing tools. These rely at their root on common demographic elements which override personalization.

If you map users by traditional measurements such as time spent online, spending, age, gender, education, residence, etc. (which goals btw seem more in line with the Social Graph or Spock than Mahalo) you produce value for marketing professionals, including their clients, the vendors and advertisers, but the evolution of personalized information that would enable construction of better destinations and communities doesn’t emerge from this. A crowd-sourced construction based on individual interests and activities, however, could open the door to many future development ideas.

From this perspective I read Dave Winer’s comment that, “Bottom-line, he needs to figure out a way to build the company so that many others can profit from it. Otherwise I don’t think it has a prayer against Google”, and understood that this was what I had found exciting, a process where users would reap benefit by contributing, and could form further natural groups and communities through the process. This is also what disturbed me about the ombudsman image, which put users firmly outside a corporate wall.

I’d thought Mahalo might be the personal interest version of a Wikepedia type community, which would naturally evolve into an endless myriad of overlapping circles, rather than a conflicted skyscraper. The way I’m understanding the building of Mahalo now, is that first the .001% will build it, and will know what to build for the 999.99%, who will then arrive in droves to use it. You think?

The millions of non-tech users on eBay in its glory days or those on MySpace through its dramatic early growth, or the additional millions of bloggers offered a blank page more recently, brought their own views and interests to open spaces that grew as a result. Who decided or really knew in advance the scope of what they’d want to do? Who realized what further growth (beyond cashing out) could be enabled for those natural congregations of individuals?

What makes the internet different that any other medium is that it is personal and interactive, and can grow from that level in an organic manner. I don’t happen to believe that personal and interactive can’t scale, only that we have not yet learned how to enable it to. This kind of scaling, in my view, cannot be accomplished by massing larger numbers of people into a depersonalized mass, but rather via enabling a dynamic growth process within which endless groups can evolve and overlap, just as communities do naturally in large urban centers. Search/info by itself would not necessarily be the perfect or only starting point for such growth, but it could certainly be one of them.

There is also a secondary aspect of Mahalo which I responded to, and this was the potential of real valuation of reputation and development of trust. These two valuable words have been turned into buzz words everywhere we turn in this web 2.0 world. When I first came to Lijit (which I think is supposed to evoke ‘legit’) last year, the word trust stood out front and center. So in I went, wandering around, and discovered that everyone there was anonymous and that there were no forums or other venues for getting to know people. When I inquired about this, I was told that the idea was that I should bring friends I trust to join me there, but I could not understand why I would do so. Squidoo originally struck me much the same way. Every lens I found of interest was written by an ‘expert’ …using a pseudonym. This reputation and trust aspect of compiled information on any topic is worth further thought in regard to Mahalo, or any other site with big growth plans. Even if you have real experts using their real names, unless they are truly famous across many fields of interest, or at least extensively credentialed, their authority will not be easy to establish with strangers.

So I finally got around to checking out Mahalo.

At first glance Mahalo seems a hybrid of a crowd sourced resource such as Wikepedia, Larry Sanger’s Citizendium which will be authored by experts, and a community compiled compendium of links to, hopefully, aggregate and replace all those great resource pages that individuals used to build and maintain, and my first response was “cool”. What I saw was an ad free human recommendation search engine. Who couldn’t get into that?

The initial impression was strong enough that I registered, as Vera, and then stopped.

There’s a basic premise here of crowdsourcing for the crowd’s own benefit but combined with quality control that is certainly appealing.

There are dozens of sites that I could submit (for which there are not yet categories), dozens of subjects that I could make a page or ten for, but I’m not a student or part time enthusiast looking to make $10 or $15 per submission, and keeping track of what I sent in while it was waiting on approval sounds a bit too much like work for which I don’t have time.

I could certainly review submissions on a range of subjects that I care about and have studied most of my life, but I don’t want/need a full time job, and the Mahalo Greenhouse (for growing things) is apparently structured with full time guides reviewing submissions.

Taking another step back, there are many non-tech individuals whose Favorites would make a better search result in the areas in which they are passionately interested, better than any existing search engine or recommendation site could produce. Some of these people wouldn’t share that list for love or money because it represents a competitive advantage in their livelihood. Others whose lists are hobby rather than professional income related, still, if I look at Mahalo through their eyes, might not find incentive to participate. For one thing, they aren’t part of the .001%.

Jason says that Mahalo is being built for them/us, the other 99.999% of the billion or so people online worldwide. If that’s the case, then I’m hoping to see guides and contributors from all the places and communities where they/we are, or at least distributed mostly across North America and the UK, since Mahalo is, for the time being, in English.

One of the things stopping me from contributing is the impression I’m getting that Mahalo intends to become a destination/community but I can’t find it. Let’s say that one of the topics that I could build something on was 20th century art and design (or at least a number of the thousands of pages that such a broad category should eventually contain). Based on the intimated goal of community(ies), I’d be expecting or perhaps hoping to ‘meet’ and possibly ‘confer’ with other members contributing on the same, or related topics. Would we, these loosely associated community members, discover one another accidentally via and then outside of Mahalo? Would our contributions be subject to the approval of ‘one of us’ or only of a paid employee of Mahalo who is or isn’t as knowledgeable in our areas?

Then there is Jason’s invitation to Jeff Jarvis to join Mahalo as an ombudsman. Bringing in an individual of stature who has a background in journalism as well as diplomacy skills to interact with the contributing community sounds like a good idea. The term ombudsman is a respectful one, generally referring to an appointed, or company hired, official whose duty it is to protect the voice and interests of the constituents, but it also implies that the constituents are the masses outside the gates who need a spokesman and are unable to elect or appoint their own.

Mahalo is, I’m assuming, a privately owned corporation in which we the contributors will play roles varying from contract employees to unpaid contributors to users. This picture does not vary too greatly from many other web constructions, and the idea of a crowd sourced human compiled search engine with quality control, as I stated earlier, is an appealing one.

The pieces of information that I’m missing here, the reason I stopped after registering, are in the questions of where the communities are, how they are to define themselves and function, and what their intended role is in the future if Mahalo turns out to be a big success? For those of us in the 99.999% who have painstakingly built various favorites and link lists in many categories over the years for our own use, what draws us to and keeps us returning to Mahalo, and what are the incentives for contributing?

I understand that Mahalo is new, at a Beta stage. My questions are not intended as criticism, or as an expectation of definitions that are not fully formed and expected to evolve. If Mahalo grows to be a big success, these questions might even matter less to me. Am I seeing a projection of community where there is really only controlled and directed crowd-sourcing?