Ross Mayfield's Weblog

43 Blogs

Some wisecracks:

If Ross Mayfield developed a ‘best blogs’ list, it might look like this.

Well, of course, it's a wiki.  Slashing rankism with a double edged sword.

And if you prefer more robust and hard-coded methodology: Issue Influence Index

Stays in Vegas

Spent the weekend in Vegas celebrating my 10th Anniversary.  The airport wasn't technically Vegas, so I can blog this bit.  As should have been expected, missed a 8am flight on Sunday.  Because of Oversells, we were on standby for 11 hours to no avail.  It was like the movie Terminal in a bar and no smoking rules.   Too bad I don't gamble.  Also had a board meeting this morning, so give me a couple of days to recover to blogging.

The slogan What Happens in Here, Stays Here is the best tagline -- ever.

MashupCamp

Time to break down the tents and celebrate another successful camp.  So what came out of it?

The structure of speed geeking (speed dating for geeks) and wooden nickles to vote on the best API encouraged more prior development than on the spot.  A few startups used it as a venue to launch.  There was a hack that occured over at MuchoCamp (more on that later), not sure what else was mashed on the spot.

There were concrete collaborations, namely StandardsForApiDocumentation which will bring needed transparency for developers.  I hosted a conversation on CommodityAPIContract -- an effort to define standard commercial terms for APIs (and SaaS, potentially, which really needs it). 

Reuters Financial Glossary Wiki

Reuters is hosting a Financial Glossary Wiki, a fascinating case study for the way enterprises will host professional communities.  For a major enterprise, this venture contains a degree of Risk:

The probability that an investment or venture will make a loss or not make the returns expected. This probability can be measured. There are many different types of risk including basis risk, country or sovereign risk, credit risk, currency risk, economic risk, inflation risk, liquidity risk, market or systematic risk, political risk, settlement risk, systemic risk and translation risk.

The Glossary was initially based upon their second edition, which is available for purchase.  Then they baked it out with an internal soft launch.  The value of this approach is you prototype in private while building a community of employees prior to launch.  The opposite of the Wikitorial debacle.  Content is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, a fundamental underpinning of the social contract, and they have adopted Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View and other values.

A well hedged position.  So what is the potential reward?  Reuters is putting itself at the center of it's industry in cultivating shared language.  The renewable resource becomes a focus of attention that can be directed in respect of the social contract.  The community that may form, their greatest challenge going forward, could contribute tangible word of mouth benefits.  This is community marketing, people -- an essential move as trust and influence shifts from institutions to peers.  And very significant institutions are starting to get it.

Fact Checking Nicolas Carr

Taking issue with Wikipedia is a great way to draw attention, as Nick Carr does again.  In this case, he is taking issue with the Nature survey that revealed greater accuracy in articles on scientific topics.  Nick fisks it with good detail, a case study in how to draw doubt.

First he claims the article as being produced by the Nature staff paired with academic experts, instead of a peer-reviewed study.  If you follow the rest of his arguments, this shouldn't be an issue.  As he says, "Someone is in charge, and experts do count."  Personally, I'd like to see Wikipedia's unprocess applied to critizing the article.  But this first assertion by Carr does it's job of raising doubt of expertise and methodology.  Even when the Nature article itself said "An expert-led investigation carried out by Nature--the first to use peer review to compare Wikipedia and Britannica's coverage of science."

Second he claims that surveying scientific articles is too narrow a challenge for Wikipedia. "As has often been noted, Wikipedia's quality tends to be highest in esoteric scientific and technological topics. hat's not surprising. Because such topics tend to be unfamiliar to most people, they will tend to attract a narrower and more knowledgeable group of contributors than will more general-interest subjects."  I don't agree with this assertion.  Quality tends to be highest where the greated amount of attention is directed.  In the negotiation of edits, expertise within a larger group shines because it can be backed up.  Excluding the unqualified implies unfounded prejudice.  I personally find the selected scope of the survey more valuable for quantitative analysis as non-scientific topics will be more subjective.

Third he claims that the media took a narrow survey and implied broad implications for quality with high-level coverage.  This is somewhat true, and, well, what mainstream media does.  And what Carr did with his first claim.  But the articles did link to the actual study.

Fourth he claims the study filtered out the comments by expert reviewers that criticized the writing style of Wikipedia.  In fact, the summarized them in the article.  The objective of the survey was a quantitative comparison, which was later complemented by supplementary qualitative information.  Carr picks three examples of full expert reviews to highlight how the qualitative information may be more important than the quantitative.  Fine and good, but I'd bet out of the 42 reviewed articles, you can find other examples that qualitatively favor Wikipedia, like this one:

ERRORS IDENTIFIED: WIKIPEDIA

Chandrasehkar, Subramanyan

1. Nobel Prize in Physics for key discoveries which have led to the currently accepted theory … [not for formulating the theory itself]
2. From 1933 to 1936 Chandra was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
3. Chandrasekhar joined the staff of the University of Chicago, rising from assistant professor of astrophysics (1937) to Morton D. Hull etc.
4. Books: Principles of Stellar Dynamics (1943).

ERRORS IDENTIFIED: WIKIPEDIA

Chandrasehkar, Subramanyan – no errors identified

Same goes for the following Wikipedia entries: Lipid, Punctuated Equilibrium and Quark.

And Brittanica entries: Woodward, Robert Burns and Mayr, Ernst.  Which is part of the point.  No editing system, closed editorial process or open, is perfect.  Instead focus on media literacy and a little wabi sabi.

Lastly and most imporantly he claims hierarchy rules:

The problem with those who would like to use "open source" as a metaphor, stretching it to cover the production of encyclopedias, media, and other sorts of information, is that they tend to focus solely on the "community" aspect of the open source model. They ignore the fact that above the community is a carefully structured hierarchy, a group of talented individuals who play a critical oversight role in filtering the contributions of the community and ensuring the quality of the resulting code. Someone is in charge, and experts do count.

The open source model is not a democratic model. It is the combination of community and hierarchy that makes it work. Community without hierarchy means mediocrity.

The open source metaphor for wikis is more than apt.  Here is a whole (unfinished) chapter on how.  Yes, in open source you have the role of project manager as a gatekeeper for contributions to ensure quality.  One person is hardly a heirarchy, but in writing code it is required.  Coding is vertical information assembly, marked by the dependencies between contributions.  Contributing in wiki does not have dependencies between contributions.  If you insert one wrong fact, it does not have a cascading or virulent effect.  This distinction is critical, as it provides permission to participate which has driven adoption.

I would also argue that open source is democratic.  Part of the reason you have a project manager is the same as an elected representative, the manager is a proxy for the community.  The community as the right to fork which holds the leader in check.  Any community member may gather a constituency to support the inclusion of their contribution.  Debate is open and largely civil, such as the British Parliment operating under an unwritten constitution, but a key difference is the actual operations are transparent.  A model that democracy will trend towards.

The open source model is a democratic model. It is the combination of community and leadership that makes it work.  Community with hierarchy trends toward tyranny.

Aside: I think it's great having Nick in the blogosphere as it makes for fun and fair debate.  As a thought excersize, consider if our two posts were on a Discussion page and a group had to sort out what the Article should be.

Jemplate

Ingy döt Net, creator of Kwiki and Socialtext dude, has created Jemplate -- the first template toolkit for Ajax.

Jemplate is a templating system for Javascript, but it's not just any templating system. It is a complete port of Perl's ubiquitous Template Toolkit. If you don't use Perl, don't stop reading. Perl (and the Template Toolkit) is only needed to compile the templates. The templating lingo itself is Perl agnostic and full featured. It resembles Python, Ruby or Javascript more than Perl.

A lot of you stopped reading, but it's a pretty great open source contribution.  Meet Ingy at MuchoCamp.

Neurotech Industry Investing and Business Conference

A wise man once told me he tries to go to a conference in an entirely different discipline once a year.  This year I'm thinking about the Neurotech Industry Investing and Business Conference on May 18 in S.F.  It will either make me smarter or richer in the long run.

Four Things

Euan Semple tagged me into participating in this damn meme.

Four Jobs I've Had:

* Boy Scout Camp Counselor
* Movie Theatre Usher
* Presidential Advisor
* CEO

Four Movies I can Watch Over and Over

* Blues Brothers
* LOTR
* Blade Runner
* Star Wars

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch
* The Office
* Entourage
* Duskwood
* The Daily Show

Four Places I've Been on Vacation
* Estonia
* Costa Rica
* Tunisia
* Eurorail

Four Favorite Dishes
* Thai Peanut Curry
* Babooti (African curry)
* Lasagna
* Carnitas

Four Places I'd Rather Be
* Interlaken, Switzerland
* Aitutauki, Cook Islands
* Tallinn, Estonia
* Lakeshore, CA

Four Bloggers I'm Tagging
* Steve Gilmor
* Tom Foremski
* Matt Mahoney
* Jonas Luster

Learning from Wikipedia

A closing Keynote by Mitch Kapor at OSBC.

Kinda cool to see Mitch give this talk, as he has a strong interest in the community process behind Wikipedia and I joined him in Frankfurt at the Wikimania conference.

Matt Asay: Grateful to finally have Mitch here. First interaction was for the organizational meeting for a industry lobbying group two years ago in Santa Clara. He was quietly typing in the corner, and I was kind of amazed that this unassuming guy was contributing. Mitch is President and founder OSAF.
What I want to talk about today is not so much where OSS is today or where it will be in 2007, but slightly beyond. Please suspend a bit of disbelief. The object of meditation is Wikipedia.

It can't possibly work. When I describe it to people as an online encyclopedia is that free and open and written by volunteers, people don't believe it. But it does. One of the top 20 websites in the world. Everyone in the room knows it, visits it, maybe 10% of the audience raises their hand to say they have written in it. The English version is bigger than the Brittanica. Random person off the street will say something, vaugely, about the Seigenthaler affair when asked about Wikipedia. If you use it, you must find it useful. Most people find it more useful than conventional reference sources. Becoming a reference source of choice.

Zen masters give you something to meditate on, like the sound of one hand clapping, for you to muse over for years in a cave. As long as you think in conventional terms, you are saddled with thinking that keeps you from understanding. There is an essential fact, that anyone can edit any article at any time. Most people start to freak out at this. How could you trust that? Isn't there vandalism, there is no quality control? Isn't it not to be trusted? The fact that anyone can is what attracted people to begin with. As a chronic social outsider from my youth, I love inviting social systems.

Myths include someone has to be in charge. Mainstream media sieze on this idea that it is problematic that nobody is in charge, the stories correspond to and reinforce our prejudices. I discovered even in myself that I find this to be true. Was talking with Jimmy Wales about how they do SysAdmin. A complex system with volunteer SysAdmins. I had assumed that since they need it to be up 24/7 they had a schedule where people sign up for coverage. Turns out that's not the case. They have 100 qualified people, so statistically there are always enough people around. If found that remarkable. I didn't have the faith. Writing content, sure, but maintaining system integrity?
Without experts, how can you trust the information? Deep seated assumptions that experts actually count. I grew up in the 60s and learned about trust in experts, VietNam. Now it's WMDs. Its a cultural thing where we are wired to not accept things.

Anyone can edit any article at any time -- the very openess that leads perpetually for opportunities for improvement. If there is a problem, it can be spotted and fixed by anyone. MSM failed to notice that after the Siegenthaler affair, the Nature article showed a comparison in favor for the quality of Scientific articles over the Brittanica. The quality was roughly equivalent for Wikipedia and fact, not statistically different. But in the Brittanica article were poor. But after the article came out, the quality of those very articles improved.

I became convinced that Wikipedia was going to be the next big thing. And things like it. I have some history here. Next big things I have gotten right before:

• 1978 the Apple II
• 1982 Lotus 1-2-3
• 1992 UUNET, one of the first ISPs.
• 1995 Real Networks
• 2005 Mozilla/Firefox

 

I like these weird things just before they hit. So why am I talking about wikis? I made a study of it, here are the learnings:

Community. Genuine community of people behind the wiki. Not an anthill or marketplace where each does their own thing and it magically aggregates. People are really tied together, Wikipedians. They are in relationship to one another and that is the glue that holds it together. You are not suprised about this

Vision. Promulgated by Jimmy Wales: create a free encyclopedia of the worlds knowledge for all the worlds people. Jimmy started as a commodities trader. Thought about what he really wanted to do. Started a mailing list, hired someone, created Nupedia with a complex process. Then went to the mailing list and called for help. Lots of people talking about vision started making progress in two to three weeks to launch Wikipedia.

Mission. Community of peer production, not abstract. People who do things all see their activity as being related to a larger goal.

Wikipedians. I went to Hamberg for the Wikimania conference, their first gathering in person. People come from all walks all over the world, a little different than the software world of open source. Writing good code is hard. Making contributions from lots of people work together is even harder. Wikipedia is very modular, everyone can work on what they want. Every article also has a talk page to discuss that article, and every user has a talk page for talking about themselves, some of the best aspects of virtual communities. People are strangers, but others cluster together.

Leadership. The leader has to serve the community. They are volunteers, a different paradigm, not a business paradigm where somewhere under the surface there is a heirarchy. Leadership in a voluntary inspiration, moral leadership, empowering and recognizing people. Jimmy calls himself a Libertarian, which makes sense in some context, but there is something about empowering a community that can be an unruly bunch that can be difficult.

Values. They talk about values openly, not a dirty word.

• Be nice: matters in the community, gets rewarded, people expect it, expect respect in a kindly fashion that expects the best of people. Holds the community together. If someone comes in to slash and burn, they say, well that's not really how we do things around here. And it works. Treating people as people, not objectsx to be moved around for your own goals.
• NPOV: neutral point of view. valuing relevant facts people can agree on. Discourages editorializing or slanted presentation of the evidence. The anti-spin doctrine.  I was skeptical about this, don't believe there is an objective truth waiting to be discovered, people bring their stuff with them.  There is a saying that in the early days there were more articles about Middle Earth than Africa.  If the goal is to be accurately capturing the knowledge of the world, but you have Hobbits over Africa, do you not have an obligation to recruit people who know about Africa?  Jimmy said I was right and there has been outreach initatives.
• Practices:
   
  • Don't criticize, improve!
  • Real-time peer review.  Users have a watchlist to notify of changes to changes you have made.  Recent Changes junkies as a volunteer activity, to monitor things like new postings from anonymous contributors.  Helps keep the quality up.  As it gets more popular, there is more motivation for people who do not share the values of the community to change articles for their point of view.  Latest issue of congressional staffers systematically buffing the articles, a hit story in the media.  This came out because there is a record of every single edit made.  But the net net is that real tiem peer review doesn't keep up with changes, better to catch it earlier than later, so there has been some tightening on editing process ofr these articles
  • Dispute resolution. Don't have time to get into it right now. You can loose hours looking at transcripts.  As if everything in our government was made out in the open. Tim O'Reilly shouts, wouldn't that be cool!

It's a big thing, but kind of a secret how it all really happens.  I dont think the Silicon Valley understands the power of it yet.  Most entrepreneurs see this opportunity space (ahem).

The challenge of alien invaders. Maybe the ecosystem is fragile.  Wikipedians are not that fond of technology, they almost do the thing by writing things down on paper and passing them around.  There will be more technology leverage. There is an enormous amount of hard to get knowledge, because there is no machine executed way of getting it.  Suppose you had an API for all the world's knowledge.  There will be discontinous innovation.

Business Opportunities.  Ross Mayfield reminded me before the talk about how Socialtext is building Wikipedias inside of companies.  Wikipedia aas a genre isn't limited to encyclopedia.  Makes perfect sense, a no brainer.  Don't want to say too much about it or I would create competition Ross doesn't want.

Wikipedia hasn't monetized their traffic, a possibility for other communities.  A guide to the web with collaboratively edited content about what are interesting website.  Tons of interesting types of collaborative filtering, like Digg, is TiVo like, indicating individual preferences, with some algorythm logic.  Valid and interesting, but people are not connecting.  Different from a bunch of people focusing on creating something.  That is higher value than collaborative filtering, my thesis, if you can get people to work together.  Look at health information, broadly speaking, why are doctors not collaborating to build such a resource -- the lack of information, locked up in a database that Harvard publishes, kills people.  I can feel the opportunity. 

Business Models.  There isn't a formula, if there was the world would be different.  The Firefox experience taught me something, they have 60 million people use it every week, if you can command a lot of attention, attention is what is valuable.  Google stepped up and said if you default the seach to us, we will revenue share with you, a $50M per year business.  A long line of partners want a piece of it.  One route is some kind of Wikipedia application will on a global basis be attracting people.  There will be dozens or hundreds of Wikipedias.  I was pointing someone now for what was going to be a big thing, it would be doing something where you harness the efforts of a community, one that is truly empowered. People here, basing their business on Linux, having a widespread community is what makes it goes.  The community should own the underlying resource, the knowledge base created, because they will contribute if they know it is a commons, not owned by the business organization which commands attention of people who come in.  A different kind of business, we see it in the software world, and it will be a good thing for business with jobs and innovation and value being created.  A form of business that will be more responsible to the larger society to which it is indebted, a very good thing.  I hope this inspires some thoughts within you, and, thank you.

 

The Open Source Community Imperative

Notes from a panel at OSBC

Peter Fenton, Accel Partners, Moderator
Ranga Rangachari, GroundWork Open Source Solutions. Has a hybrid OSS model, 100 customers.
Daniel Frye, IBM, works on their open source strategy team, manages a ton of OSS developers.
Adam Tractenberg, eBay developer evangelist
Clint Oram, SugarCRM, from inception a commercial open source entity
Mike Olsen, sold his company, Sleepycat, to Oracle today

• Peter Fenton fesses up to the irony that a VC is talking about community, but notes that enterprise software model is dead and the big hits lately have been from communities. Communities appropriately applied will be the big breakouts. Open source as an invention, a form of sales and marketing to bring costs from 60% of revenue to 20%.
• Daniel: Communities are quite different, from an analysis we found that some build around a single commercial effort, entity or individual. Looks and acts different from a community that is very broad, with multiple interests. Differences in governance models. Have learned, in some cases the hard way, it is really not easy to start communities. Much easier to leverage, adapt and adopt communities. Most important thing when building one is asking why people would join. Raymond's Rule of Everyone Scratches Their Own Itch.
• Peter: Striking differences in the level of community contributions to the code. Sleepycat does all the contributions, for example.
• Daniel: Most are less that 10%
• Clint: first thing we did was to start forums for $200. From then we ahve continued with tools for people to collaborate, SugarForge. Tools kicked off the community into high gear.
• Adam: we had a community of buyers and sellers before developers. We saw people screen scraping to automate, a latent demand for web services. We had a community that was reaching out to us. Gradually releasing commercial constraints for leveraging our platform. There are still costs for maintaining a web service. Making it more free has enabled greater growth, spreading eBay in areas we haven't anticipated, the best part of the initative.
• Peter: they are often viewed as cost centers, how do you explain that.
• Adam: eBay is metrics driven. Didn't start that way with the project, but now 45% of all listings go through a web service. We track (paraphrasing: everything).
• Mike: It's okay to pay attention to the cost center aspect, but you have to take a longer view. Fundamentally you want a happy community producing customers for you. The things that haven't worked as well are when we have tried to learn lessons that are objectively true in business school. How to do direct marketing. Had to build out infrastruture, cold call for lead gen, that was at best breakeven. Doesn't give us the same scale or engagement. On the developer forum, watching interactions, you get a very good idea for who is interested. The one way programs don't work. It has to be two way.
• Clint: When we focused inward on our internal operations, we neglected the community sites and had a bit of backlash for not participating enough. Had to refactor priorities. I then focused full time on the community.
• Ranga: not having a community person has been successful. Lots of splinter communities, keep them engaged by contributions. 10-15% of an engineer's time is spent contributing back to the community.
• Peter: VCs see it as a radical distirbution advantage, what about the development advantage?
• Mike: we segment the value of distribution and development (what we do). The model we have works for us, the Linux model works for other projects. Different assumptions for business models and strategies for communities.
• Daniel: the design of the community and participation happens after deciding the business model.
• Clint: Don't shift models in mid stream
• Adam: I have venture backed and hobbyist developers.  Need to help them connect, differently.  Uses a developer event that only costs $50, because they want developers to connect with powersellers.  Have to look at it holistically, beyond providing support and forums.
• Ranga: needs are different for different communties, and includes the wider ecosystem
• Peter: some have resisted the profit motive, like Apache
• Daniel: they are against direct monetization, but they are fine as a leverage point.  They don't want or need to give up control.
• Ranga: each views OSS as an end.  No customer says I like it, but wont pay for it.  An area where you get what you pay for, we see no resistance.
• Daniel: a tension would exist when a commercial entity only takes advantage without giveback. 
   
• Adam: to have a commercially successful web service, you have to align your needs with your developers.  Such as when efficiency in a market wins for all parties.  Tim O'Reilly's example of people who use Google are using Linux.  Lots of people leverage inside the firewall to create services outside the firewall.
   
• Clint: set clear goals for the project.  With that you have to be careful about how you mix the two models.  With SugarCRM.com we also have community interaction we don't interject in the forums.  The tension is, I am trying to interact to get a solution, I don't want to be cross sold support.  Need to keep the commercial and community activities seperate, but acknowledged.
• Daniel: some companies have gotten these things confused
• Clint: and some taking firm stands, like Apache
• Ranga: seen this before, where people see the true open source community as a channel -- a big mistake.  Have to treat them as different entities.
• Peter: as the entity extracts profit, RedHat example creating animosity.  How do you handle the tension when it exists.
• Mike: should I take this one?  There are guys who will, might and won't pay.  Your job is to try to move some of them along from might to will, but don't try it with the wont's.  There are some people that rejects the company should make a profit, but you need to be polite and not alienate the broader community.  Our view is rational people do not object to you making a living and the irrational are not going to be important for your business over time.  Need to engage constructively or shut your mouth.
   
• Daniel: the last thing you do is pick a license.  No license is toxic, they have different purposes.
• Peter: SugarCRM picked one that matched their community without being religious
• Clint: became psuedolawyers to figure it out, the success of our endeavor would not happen if we were the only ones to make money.  So we chose the MPL to let others make money, which helped build a vibrant community for OSS and commercial.  Releasing our stuff today under a microsoft shared license because it works for some customers.
• Daniel: the legal folks need to be more tightly integrated into the team than any other I have seen.  Lawyers need 3-4 years in this field.  You want a team that can converse as developers, how code flows and how community works.
• Adam: one of the most suprising things at eBay was how clued in our lawyers were on OSS.  I wanted a fairly popular license, let people make money, keep us from being sued, not give up our patents and it worked out with relatively little back and forth.
• Peter: how does Oracle or others value a community
• Mike: you would have to ask the deal team at Oracle, which was pretty sophisticated.  What impressed me coming in was the deep interest in maintaining the community.  They want to sustain the community, and support us in how we interact with them.  I believe this is true, prove to yourself by just watching.  We won on the technical merits, but Oracle doesn't need to come to my 25 person company.  The reach and breadth of our channel, the differences within our community.  Fairly Darwinian, can't predict all needs, but they will be revealed.
• I asked about the risk when there is an acquisition or change of control that the community is disinfranchised, how would this discount the value of a company built on a community.
   
• Adam: Oracle buying sleepycat injects risk into the community, but he is right that the risk can be managed.
• Daniel: from Sleepycat ass a different form of leadership ranging to more broadbased communities, I can't think of where this has happened.
   
• Peter: VA screwed up Weblogic.
• Susan from Apache: we do care about commercialization.  Isn't it true that the nature of the community changes when there is a financial stake in it?
• Daniel: The community itself can't be acquired.  When we make a big play, we go for a broad-based community, it is less fragile.