Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Trademark and Fair-play

Tim O'Reilly has said his piece about the Web 2.0 trademark affair, in a way that every entrepreneur should read to understand the working practice of trademark law.

A few years ago I had a consulting company called Mayfield Enterprises.  Makes sense for a sole-proprietorship, my last name and what I do.  Then I got a cease and desist letter from Wilson Sonsini on behalf of the Mayfield Fund, which had recently changed it's trademark to Mayfield (I'm not linking to them in hopes of becoming the one true Mayfield by web standards, but I hope I never beat out dear old Betsy).  At first it was a bit terrifying, big money, big firm with firm verbage.  So I called up the lawyer, let him know my name and what I thought was fair, as in use.  The poor guy was subjected to a history lesson, as the Township of Mayfield used to be South Palo Alto. It's where I was raised and long before that Leland Stanford successfully triumphed over the rowdy bar town outside campus limits.

Just as Tim described, the left hand often doesn't know what the right hand is doing when it comes to trademark.  Later I got to know the partners at the Mayfield Fund.  Whether they have good judgment or not, it wasn't exercised in the fore-mentioned case.  The lawyers were on autopilot in an area where current practice is to fire across the bow.

I believe trademark has valid utility in this world and had significantly greater incentives for cultural production than copyright and patents.  There is more than merit for how it deters consumer confusion.  I wish for a model that was not defensive (file, search, cease and desist), but instead at least a partial preventative model (regular people could easily run a search before first use) or one where the escalation chain was encouraged to use mediation and arbitration for disputes for parties that first meet through conflict.

Lately I've written personal emails to wiki providers that infringe on the Socialtext(TM).  A while ago, someone agreed alter their mark amicably to prevent conflict -- the kind of thing that can happen through conversation to the benefit of both parties with significantly lesser cost.  More recently, the personal approach didn't work with a company in South America and I'm trying to avoid action.  Worse yet, there is a company in Estonia that not only uses a infringing mark, but has copied our product and collateral at every turn.  This saddens me because I know how innovative companies in the little country can be, and I wonder how any self-respecting businessperson could have so little faith in their ability to do something different.  The company obviously knows me, but has never attempted contact.  I'm challenging the infringement, as is my fiduciary duty, but it pains me to do so. 

The practical reality of my growing business is I don't scale, and such activity will be increasingly impersonal.  The primary question to me is if you consider the personal productivity, legal and social costs -- if management can be involved in mediating the cease and desist function.  Perhaps this can be justified if it decreases costly litigation.  But there is a question for if the activity is core or context.

I'm wondering if people can see the side of running a business in the current environment, and if this is fair play.  Particularly if you have been on both sides of the argument.

New Industry Leaders Summit, Japan

Had a wonderful time at the New Industry Leaders Summit in Sapporo, Japan.  On Hokkaido, the northern-most island, it is the non-trademark infringing Web 2.0 event for Asia.  The leading indicator of their latest bubble was the $8k tuna that was reduced to sushi with the efficiency of a Toyota manufacturing line and ritual of the cow sacrifice in Apocalypse Now.

In my presentation, I described Enterprise 2.0 and wikis as consistent with the wabi-sabi aesthetic:

• All things are impermanent
• All things are imperfect
• All things are incomplete

Embracing the constant state of change and finding beauty within the mess is something easier for Easterners than the Western mind-set.  So too is the role of social capital in the enterprise.  And even among strangers, a different pattern of cooperation emerges with social software.  Conversation begins on the Discussion pages of the Japanese Wikipedia and when a draft has consent, it is moved to the Article page.  Not only is there appreciation for initial structurelessness in tools, but in their practices.

The leading edge of location and mobility is being crafted by startups in Japan.  With one widely deployed GPS network, requisite billing systems and advanced consumer behavior -- it is an ideal testbed.  Next year two other networks will provide support for a true mass market and Europe and the rest of world will follow.  Startups are benefiting from a Venture resurgence, with diligent firms remaining after the crash, most subsidiaries of trading houses, and an increasing focus on earlier stage investments.  The funny thing is I don't think these startups are on the Where 2.0 radar, but they have time relative to Valley startups and incumbents, so some are patiently fueled by Angels while prototyping the future.

The Elephant's Dilemma

I'm in Sapporo, Japan, at the New Industry Leader's Summit.  While paneling with Scott Dietzen of Zimbra and Mark Tolliver of Palamida, I had time between translation to think of some ways of describing open source phenomena.

The Elephant's Dilemma is when two or more large incumbents face disruption and need to cooperate to get out of the door, one at a time.  But their instinct is to fight with each other, while little guys run through their legs (some get squashed).

The analogy proved tough to translate. 

It also dawned on me that when Tim O'Reilly talks about how many people use open source if they use Google, that's using open source infrastructure.  Firefox is an example of using open source applications, of course.  But the interesting thing is how simply using open source infastructure or application contributes value.  Although at a lesser scale on the power law of participation, each new user to a given platform is an attactor for developers to contribute to it.  Much more virtuous than dancing with elephants.

Nick Carr is the New Dave Winer

First Nick Carr said Wikipedia isn't like open source because there isn't hierarchical gate-keeping, and then he said Wikis won't work because they don't favor experts. Now the claim is Wikipedia is dead because it is giving up it's open editing ideals, trending towards hierarchy and gate-keeping.

Sensational stuff as always, but factually wrong as usual. Go see Jimmy Wales' comments and then amaze yourself at how Nick is sticking to his guns to fulfill his mission:

My interest here, in case it's eluded anyone, is very simple: making sure that people know what Wikipedia really is and what Wikipedia really isn't.

The great thing about sensationalism is that it energizes debate within the network. I'm sure the mission is being fulfilled -- more people now know Wikipedia continues to fulfill it's ideals -- and despite sticking to his public guns, I think Nick secretly admits that's the real case. Thanks Nick, for making it fun, happy to give you some link love.

Apologizes for any ad hominem, simply makes for a sensational headline.

Written on a plane from Tokyo to Sapporo for the New Industry Leaders Summit.

Firefox the Nokia Open Source Browser

Nokia is open sourcing their mobile browser, potentially great news for users and developers.  But what if they made the Mozilla Foundation the trustee of this code?  Not only would they gain neutral stewardship, but potentially a large base of developers to solve the really large problems.

Speaking of Nokia and open source, I'm a judge in a developer contest for the Nokia 770 Tablet platform.

Tokyo Sights

  Kobayashi-san 
  Originally uploaded by Ross Mayfield.

In between meetings today, I had a chance to take pictures like a Japanese tourist. 

Here's the set. 

Hat tip to my host.

Time is Short, Chances are Shorter

When I was a younger buck, I'd swallow my fears and introduce myself to the most important person in the room.  There was little to gain except a handshake from Clintons and Gorbachevs, or sparking a lesson with the right question of perhaps lesser historical figures.  The encounters back then were simply experiences.

Over time there has been more to contribute to and more to gain from real conversations with very busy people.  As I became more busy, I realized how valuable the time of leaders is more valuable.  Now, you always have the opportunity to learn more by listening from learned men.  Making an impression does not come from sheer expression or superego, but an economy of words that comes from you.

A mistake I seem to make these days is to believe that chances are abundant.  At a given event, a knowing glance or quick hello instead of conversation, thinking that later in the event there will be chance and time.  But the second chance doesn't come when you are past impression, or not.  When you watch a learned man or knowing woman be social, recognize the richness of first conversation.  Valuing chance makes time more valuable.

From the plane to Tokyo, where I have lots of time.

Enterprise 2.0 is Made of People

And one of them is a legal person.

SAPPHIRE Blogger Corps

Attending SAPPHIRE as a credentialed blogger was not only a wonderful personal experience, but perhaps a watershed moment for how enterprises engage in social media. 

Dubbed the Paris Airshow of enterprise software by Vinnie, SAP's mega-conference represents all that is good and bad about the industry.  Good in that a significant amount of business gets done this way within the ecosystem of the largest enterprise vendor.  Bad in that half of the cost of enterprise software is sales and marketing. 

The competitive anti drives this spend, but a good part of the industry has moved towards SaaS, open source distribution, and ad hoc events as alternatives.  Initially this happened because of necessity (SAP itself froze such spending just before the bust, .pdf).  Hasso Platner once remarked that one day buyers will simply serve themselves through their site.  Beyond self-service, community models are beginning to support this shift.

The precursor to the watershed moment was when the blogger corps gathered for Port and Cigars on the first night.  Many met for the first time, some old friends, similar to the usual suspects feeling at Web 2.0 conferences.  We didn't know what we were in for, but formed a tight knit community with conversation built upon conversation.  The next morning we arrived to the Blogger's Corner within a Press Room that took up half a wing of the Orlando Convention center.  We had tight schedules of one-on-one interviews and immediately shared them to create the right many-on-one encounters.

There is certainly camaraderie within a press corps, an experience I've had from the days in politics, but there is definitely competition that prevents such productive behavior.  From second-hand feedback, we even outperformed the core.  How often is it that a journalist has hands-on experience as an ISV, an analyst has no commercial bias, or even an employee that has a reputation that in some cases trumps bias?  Every scheduled interview, time a SAP executive stopped by the blogger's corner or casual encounter with one at a reception -- the conversation was more than bargained for.  Either rigorous domain expertise was applied, or a cutting edge Enterprise 2.0 perspective sliced through  well curdled butter.

When I was briefed on Duet (enables a more usable interface to SAP within Microsoft Office), I argued that the same old structured thing within Outlook doesn't make it as simple as email and asked if Duet would be as open to develop upon as NetWeaver.  I met the guy who runs Open Source within SAP and was pleasantly suprised at their level of engagement.  We had a wild conversation with a guy representing Enterprise 2.0 within SAP that boiled down to a debate over scarcity vs. abundant thinking, that made me realize the need for shared language.  I got to see the concept of a true Enterprise 2.0 app by a designer that if productized could enable SAP to be more than the process company.  This proof point was important because the thrust of formal presentations was SAP's focus on becoming more usable and collaborative.  But the news of the event to me was that SAP isn't just some stogy massive German company.  If course, I know this because of the work I do with folks in the Valley, but that was the takeaway from the conversations.

The greatest contention I have with the more formal message came from Bill McDermot who runs SAP America, a cute soundbite that Best of Breed does not Breed.  Well, Best of Show is a Dog.  First of all, the longstanding claim against a diverse vendor population is that if proliferated results in complexity unwanted by IT.  Second, this contradicts the NetWeaver vision of SoA reducing the need to standardize on a software stack and enabling ISVs to deliver value.  Third, it's the ecosystem that wags the dog into needed change.  Fourth, why would software be the one area of spending that shouldn't adopt a portfolio strategy.  Fifth, when I look at the industry today I see substantial innovation.  I'm harping on a soundbite out of context, and the comment was probably more directed towards Oracle.

Perhaps the funniest moment was when a guy from a Canadian newspaper came over to the blogger's corner and got in an argument with me about the quality of blogging and trustworthiness of Wikipedia.  It didn't start that way, and one of the better guys for such a debate, but while explaining the basics I showed him how his newspaper had 40 inbound links, compared to others with 400 that week -- his simply claimed he didn't believe it.  He'll probably go off an write a damning article on the bias and quality of the blogosphere, to complete his own circular reasoning, but I'm sure he discovered something new.

Perhaps the best moment for me in the newsroom was talking with Don Tapscott, who happened to be in the press room, about wikis and economics.  Don does some SAP stuff and research with Next Gens these days, and definitely gets it.

But the watershed moment was more likely Niel Robertson's encounter with Henning Kagermann, the CEO of SAP.  He was pulled aside from a reception by a man who had genuine interest in the new, probably what got him to where he is, a genuine conversation occurred.

Now think about what SAP accomplished, with credit to Jeff Nolan, at relatively little cost:

• The leading enterprise bloggers participated in the conference.  They didn't feel handled and while there was a bit of controversy in posts, nothing became a crisis.
• A wiki with open editing was used responsibly as the center of activity, without an edit war
• Executive interviews and exposure resulted in conversations beneficial for all parties
• A blogger corps convened as an exercise in easy group forming that leveraged a backchannel to make sense of complexity in a constructive way
• The quality of blog posts, rare with any event, was substantial and gained outside coverage
• The same blogger corps now has a shared experience around the SAP brand that will probably influence future opinions

All this took was a little trust and access.  I'd venture that other enterprises will follow suit.

Enterprise 2.0, SoA and the Freeform Advantage

Andrew McAfee, who first mentioned the term Enterprise 2.0 to me on December 1st 2005, provides a definition:

Now, since I was the first to write extensively about Enterprise 2.0¹ I feel I'm entitled to define it:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software within companies.

'Freeform' in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

'Social' means that there's always a person on at least one end of the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.  With wikis, prediction markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping and/or bookkeeping.

I'm in agreement, and find it easier to be than naming debates of the past (and reminiscent at my first stab at naming: “Social Software adapts to its environment, instead of requiring its environment to adapt to software”).

If there is debate, it will be on two fonts: the role of organizational identities (Egalitarian) or an emaphasis on technology over social dynamics.  McAfee focuses on the second, that of Enterprise 2.0 vs. SoA:

Jeff Nolan insightfully points out that Web 2.0 is greatly aided by things like scripting and REST architectures, and I agree that Enterprise 2.0 applications are a lot easier to use if users can drag and drop and do other cool AJAX-enabled things from within the browser.  But to me these components aren't even enabling technologies, since Enterprise 2.0 could happen without them. They're clearly accelerating technologies, but keep in mind that the first wiki was built in 1994 and put on the Web in 1995, well before the initial XML spec was submitted.

Programmers could build fully-functional wikis, blogs, tagging systems, and prediction markets by carving them out of solid COBOL and serving them through the first Netscape browser.  They'd be clunky, but they'd work.  And I bet they'd draw users, too, because they'd tap into our desire to use technology to interact with each other, and also tap into the good stuff that emerges when we do so.  As I wrote earlier, I think of Web 2.0 as the era when technologists really woke up to this;  Enterprise 2.0 will be the era when business leaders join them...

Claims about the power and benefits of SOA and its predecessors have been running ahead of reality for years.  Claims about the power and benefits of freeform social software, on the other hand, mostly cropped up in the wake of real-world examples...

A second difference between SOA and Enterprise 2.0 (which I think is closely connected to the first one) is that a service oriented architecture has to be imposed up front, while an Enterprise 2.0 environment emerges over time...

The second front, that Enterprise 2.0 is Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities, not only flys in the face of enterprise culture and convention, but previously encoded political bargains.  For example, a primary property of social software is easy group forming -- but most enterprise systems expressly prevent it.  To form a group, you not only need permission from IT, but complex configuration and in many cases even software development.  Beyond applications, ever come across an LDAP implementation that supports easy group forming?  This runs counter to the way many enterprises actually work today, where ad hoc cross-functional teams drive more than professional services organizations.

A second example is fine grained security.  Content management, document management, portals and poorly designed wikis highlight per object/page permissioning.  Certain expert users have the ability to control access and rights for a specific document.  This harms productivity -- when a user needs to access a document to perform a task and has to incur the overhead that can unlock it, plus the overhead of locking (structure upfront) and unlocking itself.  This harms knowledge sharing -- documents go undiscovered and are decidedly static, despite how the knowledge in the document is never finished.  This harms competitive advantage -- any system that exhibits inertia compromises a firm's ability to adapt to it's dynamic environment.

While .pdf is where knowledge goes to die, there are some documents that benefit from being static.  But they are a fraction of the documents in a given enterprise.  And with the discovery afforded by hypertext and tagging, documents have the potential to exist in a social context.  Even a locked down document, if viewable, can be annotated through linked messages. 

Imagine how useful Wikipedia would be if a handful of admins could lock down links to articles indefinately and without oversight, their ability to be discovered through Google, let alone edit them.  Then imagine the same thing behind the firewall, where there is less risk (you can presume a greate innocence of users and know their identity).  Utility is decidedly compromised. 

This is why enterprise systems have low adoption rates, little user generated content, high quality metadata and email is used for everything.  Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use.  Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software -- sharing control creates value.

UPDATE: Traditional KM Systems Compared To Print summarizes a post by Jeff Jarvis (The Book is Dead) in related terms:

1. Enterprise 2.0 defreezes knowledge.
2. Enterprise 2.0 enables knowledge churn & flow.
3. Conversations are central to Enterprise 2.0 and incidentally knowledge resides in conversations.

Warcraft is the New Cult of the CEO

Dan Farber on something kinda funny:

Video: Socialtext CEO, blogger and level 60 human Paladin (called Kalevipoeg) Ross Mayfield (below) explains his fascination with World of Warcraft. Ross says he plays the massive multiplayer game about 5 hours a week, but surely he is undercounting. He is part of a WOW guild that includes Joi Ito, an investor in his company and the WOW fan who described the game as the "new golf." It's the social experience and collaboration that makes WOW more than a game, Ross says. He even found a new customer for Socialtext while playing WOW. Business and pleasure combined…just like golf.  Also Jonas Luster, of Socialtext and a man with a doctorate in Social Psychology and Criminology, explains his WOW addiction.

 

Watch the video

For the record, I don't play WoW in the office.

Shai Agassi on Community Value

Shai Agassi held a private Q&A after his keynote.  Of interest to me was his comments on their largest online community, the Software Developer Network:

500,000 visitors per month.  Aggregation of knowledge that is second to none.  slashdot for SAP.  SIs in India are hiring them 500 people at a time and saying for their first three months they are supposed to participate in SDN.  Aggregation and knowledge and self-categorization has created an environment where you know the guy who is giving advice may have a point ranking that shows they don't have a life, but a lot of knowledge.  We are contributing perhaps 20% of the content.  Average time from Q&A is less than 30 minutes, I wish our support channels were that effective.

I hear that Q&A through formal channels it's a day and a half, and probably at a cost for $85 to $245 per incident).  Step back and think about it for a moment.  It's the value proposition of a public community interface to an enterprise.  In this case, it is for software developers.  But what would happen if community was broadened to the whole ecosystem?

Shh...it's under construction here.

SAP Press Briefing

Raw notes from the SAPPHIRE press conference.  Later I'll contextualize it so I am less of a mynah bird

Bill Wohl, VP of Communications, hosted a press conference that was open to the web and in-room press/bloggers for questions.  This event combined ASUG (the user group) and SAPPHIRE; there are 290 partners at SAPPHIRE, twice as much as last year. 

This year we are including bloggers, an increasingly important channel for news and insight.  Many from the media also bloggers.  We are taking a lead position in offering a program for bloggers.  I encourage you to visit them at the Bloggers Corner and I'd like to officially welcome them.

Henning Kagermann, CEO

NetWeaver is being presented as a backbone of business.  This differs from the traditional transaction backbone because of an emphasis on human collaboration and the ability to adapt composite applications to changing market needs.  They believe they will realize the full potential of Enterprise SoA:

• 100% compliance
• adoption 5 times faster
• double productivity
• cut TCO in half
• speed of change 10 times faster

The Americas is the region with the highest level of user satisfaction.  Highlights the success of NetWeaver: 31k installations of NetWeaver components, for all industries, with 400+ ISV products powered by NetWeaver and 300+ customers in the enterprise services achitectures program.  Letting customers and partners build composite applications on top of our suite.  Points to the case of Manchette innovating on their own.  Common pattern of what partners want to achieve: move from product provider to solution provider.  Flexibility for supplier and customer side.

Shai Agassi

Moving from silo applications to a complete suite.  Through SoA can now resolve events that are not only across silos, but businesses.  So the industry is moving to a complete suite.  Our job is:

• ensure compliance
• consolidate the core
• optimize operational networks
• manage relationships
• enable new growth
• manage performance

Acquisition of Versa is becoming a suite for managing governance risk and compliance.  Middle of next year they will have a single unified risk balance sheet for a company.  Trying to simplify ERP, a new GUI and usability of the transactions within the client. Duet and these enhancements will help user satisfaction.  Announcing the acquisition of Frictionless Commerce.  Collaboration with Microsoft, Mendecino, is now Duet, the experience for lightweight usage embedded in the stream of work of a users, role and industry based contextual usage.  A whole new user experience and the ability do deliver custom transactions to the desktop.  BI Accelerator lets you take large collections of data and put them into a Google-like experience and provide a 100x price performance in the first 30 customers.  Highlights the power of the Ecosystem, where every partner for the mentioned products promised last year delivered this year.  Launched the Powered by NetWeaver Fund, a $125M early stage fund.

Leo Apotheker

People with the insight to excel, processes that respond to the pace of your business and infrastructure that leads to sustained cost reduction.

Bill McDermott, President and CEO of SAP Americas

Customers are telling us we need to be innovative, because innovative companies out perform.  Need help positioning for change and growth, and realize there is an execution gap.  CEO wants to grow, but the CIO is not positioned to deliver.  80% of IT budgets are tied up in managing the status quo.  We all learned that best of breed may be best, but doesn't breed.  Duet as a productivity advantage.  CRM on demand to not only get the app, but grow in it's use, beyond contact info to get a 360 view of the customer.  Analytics in the hands of a a knowledge worker.  Knowing the customer, in the 28 industries, sizes and their processes comes from our investment in people the understand, support and provide post-sale value optimization.  Culture makes and breaks companies, and our success is based on it's people power.  Doubled the US workforce over the last few years and near zero voluntary turnover within the company.

Q&A excerpts

Shai on the NetWeaver Fund.  $125 is from SAP.  Will co-invest with venture firms.  Won't be a specific firm at a given point in time.  Similar time horizon as VCs, 7 yr return with one or two investments.  Average investment size, "a nice chunk of change."  But less than $5m.

Niel Robertson asks about low adoption rates.  What percentage of users actually use SAP workflow?

Shai: A lot have adopted, but the quesiton is how many events are driven through the workflow.  2,000 events are exposable, but not all are driven through the system  Duet gives a simple interactive way to expose the event and facilitate it. (Personally I think he ducked the question by changing the metric)

Vinni representing the blogger brother and sisterhood.  Two questions: When Cheney was at Haliburton did he take you hunting? (the head of ASUG is at Haliburton) Where is SAP's investments into different industry functionality?

Apotheker: I've never been hunting.  We don't have a specific industry announcement because it is a continuous investment across them.  One example is what we have done for retail over the last 18 months has created an end-to-end solution.

Learning Overlay Virtual Environment

At the MSR Social Computing Symposium, a good part of the conversation was massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft.  Researchers have issues accessing data and setting up proper control and test environments require $10M.  Because of the high level of user adoption and engagement, there seems to be great promise for game engines to support learning.  Most approaches suggest developing new content on top of game engines.  In effect, creating new games.

But when discussing this it dawned on me there are not only prohibitive costs, but risks for adoption.  Meanwhile, there are platforms like WoW that have sunk cost and proven adoption.  Perhaps someone can build a learning environment on top of WoW? 

For example, WoW is all about gold and leveling.  You know, math.  AddOns like Auctioneer give you an advantage in the game by helping you price auction items.  Other interface AddOns help display statistics to coordinate attacks across players.  What if someone leveraged the simple scripting language to create an Auction add on that gradually introduced mathematical concepts towards building full fledged arbitrage models?  Or a UI mod that presented problems that, if solved, provided you an in-game advantage?

Judith Donath pointed out to me the need to frame and relate such in-game experiences to that of the everday world.  This seems to be the key -- explaining not only how solving a problem or building a model gives you advantage in a virtual world -- but the real world. 

I would LOVE to see some prototypes in this direction.

SAPPHIRE

Next week I'm in Orlando for SAPPHIRE.  Bloggers in attendance include:

• Charlie Wood
• Jason Wood
• Jeff Nolan
• Niel Robertson
• Ross Mayfield
• Vinnie Mirchandani
• Zoli Erdos

The SAP Event Wiki is here. 

dcamp

dcamp, the camp for designers and developers, kicks off tomorrow night. IFTF and the Pinceton Review have been kind enough to provide space for the Saturday sessions, making it a block-party of sorts.  Good thing too, as there are 180 attendees so far...

Christian Rock Problem

My favorite outake from the SCS:

Rock is transgressive, but it's hard to be transgressive if you are a good Christian

Microsoft Social Computing Symposium

I'm in Redmond for a Social Computing Symposium.  The wiki (powered by Socialtext, naturally) is private, but the video is streaming at http://131.107.151.221/scs and the IRC channel is irc://irc.freenode.net/#scs2006

Here's some raw notes...

Games will transform the world of work

Clay Shirky... The Christian Rock problem is not just serious but intractable - modes of user interfaace and social interaction from worlds are not broadly portable to other domains and transfering to the world of work is highly limited. Castronova: real world value on virtual goods, but this invites people to ignore the _difference between productive and participatory value._ Assembly line with stolen car has extractable value, as opposed to a poker game with a stolen card. Latter is a site of participatory value, the value doesn't stay with the card, and would disrupt the value of the game. Games are in the magic circle, sometimes physical, always mental, to immerse and expend energy to solve unecesary tasks. Exciting and addictive -- tempting to beleive that if we open up the circle it will get out into the world, but what happens is the world comes into the circle.

Three theories:

• Games are normal
  • High chance of outside applciability
• games are unusual
  • average chance of outside applicabilty
• games are special
  • low chance of outside applicability (addictiveness makes portability low)

We will see a deeping rather than a spread of the things we know about game environments.

Mobile in India

Dina Mehta...Bombay has 1M people per square mile. India has such a vast population that is rapidly becoming a mobile society today. 75M mobile users vs. 45M landline. 4-5M users per month. 200M by 2010. Uses go beyond calls, for their business, entertainment. Helps bring the cost of doing business down. Entertainment use is greater than the rest of the entertainment industry. Missed call phenomenon: a guesture where you call but the other person doesn't receive on purpose, while conveying a message. Mobile and SMS is how people are connecting to the net. 75% are pre-paid, US $2.50/month. The Indian Idol has 55M text messages coming in. How can that community be harnessed, even for commercial purposes? Instruments for entertainment, status symbol, friends and business -- but what does that mean for having one device that does so many tasks.

Computer games with real-world consequences

Daniel Pargman...Location based games -- using the city as a game board. Not many exist, but the genre is breaking new territory. 400 cell phones in China, 2B worldwide. Botfighters. Scan environment, if close to another player, you can fire at them. 24/7. Once every 24 hours, a player can fire a long range weapon.

Shooting Silver (a player):

1. Closing in
2. Getting out
3. Basking in fame

(this so reminds me of a game we played in high school with nerfish guns, where school and home were the only free spaces from the hunt) Launched april 2001 in sweden - 7k registered users, 90% maile, avera age 26. SMS with GPS. Legal, social and ethical issues.

In IRC, discussion of creating Assassin for the mobile phone, like, tonight. Also: zephoria: tangent.. assassin is the #1 reason why college students remove their class schedule from facebook. http://mobileassassins.com

Mobile computing in the classroom

Cathy Beaton... In my teaching I try to involve people in the use of technology, but it comes to haut " 5 use a chat room, another uses 2/3 of the classroom disengaged. The delimma is there is so much power and nobody has a cluse how to use it. Her main point: using this technology in the classroom levels the playing field for those with disabilities. They seized upon ICQ because it was character by character. Cultivating the backchannel Howard Rheingold... Why is the backchannel in this room so focused on the topic? Use of these tools happens despites us. There is a role for educators to use the media that they are using. Leaving it wild may be fun and be interesting, but in the long run, an opportunity to cultivate it. Looking for people to work with him on this opportunity.

MMOG as gateway drug

Constance Steinkuehler : MMOG as a gateway drug, how can games transfer to learning. Three tough issues:  

1. Access: what are the gateways/barriers. From play to Mod to?    
2. Colonization    
3. Christian rock problem.

Loosing the element of transgression.

Sovereignty

Tim Burke : Governance is how to make decisions, sovereignty is the source of authority. From I am the king to we are the people. The MMOG developer is a sovergn. What is the public interest of the sovereign? What determines the legitimacy of the sovereign? Leave it to community management and you get flames on forums. Define the basis, define the public interest. Stop managing, start ruling: constraints on the ruler, explain and justify decisions, improve the flow of info, imagine the citizenry and cut out the middleman. When achieved, the sovereign can be a participant in the world. Example of in-game crucifixtion in a Roman sim, or one where a Pharoah can be petitioned for change. Star Wars Galaxy doesn't do this, having to pay maintainence, but where does it go and under what purpose/right? I see the benefits for authority in game, but unsure about the cost the need for team play.

Nic Ducheneaut : 250k chars observed for 10 months. Players dont spend that much time in groups the largetr the group required the less players are interested, guild social networks are sparsely knit. Players come to worlds simply to be surrounded by others. This is not Bowling Alone. Organic forms of sociability: letting things emerge vs. structuring interactions. How to support indirect sociability better?

• design for a spectator experience    
• support non-instrumental communication    
• media for imagining the community    
• emphasize indirect interdependencies (e.g. economy)

(Part of what works in WoW is the Permission to Participate pattern, you don't have to engage socially to play)

Migrating a group from game to game.

Andy Phelps : Doesn't matter if we all start at level 1, but if our 100 users can come into the game with data about relationships. Didn't clay have a thing about how groups vote to migrate some time ago? mining instead of having sex Dan Hunter : Because of persistence, resource scarcity and game design, economies and properrty emerge.    

• The property is real, in all meaninful senses of the word, and legally.    
• The economy is real. $20B Because of exchange and wage arbitrage, worlds are a current apogee of the globalization of service jobs. Typical chinese worker is either          
  
  • full time worker, 16-25, no college, 9thgrade equiv no english          
  • part time (missed stats)                
    
    • goal of 200-300 gold per hour

Wikipedia as a bureacratic third place

Fernanda Viegas...usually as a nice place with free form collaboration, but claiming there is a lot of beaurucracy and process that a lot of people are not familiar with. Today's featured article, how do they get there? You have to nominate featured article candidates. Where you explain why it is worthwhile. Good articles, medicine collaboration of the week and peer review. Wikipedia: what is a good article? WikiProject Good articles. WikiProject Medicine/Collaboration of the Week, ensuring breadth and quality. Peer review of AIDS article had 56 postings, votes + comments. Citations to wikipedia guidelines: WP:WIAFA, NPOV, bloated ToC, article sixe, WP: Lead, WP: Not. Banners at the top of the talk page show the workflow. Pending tasks on the Antartica:Talk page. Guidelines: 76 toop , 58 naming conventions, 91 how to, 12 delete. Stucture: namespaces, only two are about content, the rest is meta. Does this documentation lead you to bureaucracy?

Optimize Enterprise 2.0

Optimize Magazine has an article by Howard Greenstein on Enterprise 2.0:

Depending on your perspective, Web 2.0 is either the latest fad, old ideas in new packaging, or a real change in thinking that business and IT executives need to take very seriously. My vote is for the third perspective...

Perhaps the most convincing reason to get on board with new Web technologies is this: IT executives who missed or ignored such disruptive technologies as the wildfire spread of mobile devices are now scrambling as handheld synchronization and mobile-application capabilities become standard business requirements. Unlike last time, when IT was forced to adapt as new technologies came in through the back door, CIOs can now bring the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies in through the front door, leaping to the front of the innovation curve.

The article includes practical examples of wiki, blog and mashup use.  The image above is from Jim Cuene.

LinkedIn Public Profile

I've always preferred contact through a LinkedIn referral, but haven't had a way to point to how.  Now LinkedIn has Web Profiles.  Mine is here:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/rossmayfield

Jeff Clavier has more.

Disclosure: Reid Hoffman, the CEO of LinkedIn is an investor in Socialtext.