Curiouser and Curiouser! on reputation-trust

The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 10:01:18 +0100

Doing My Best Not to Scream.

Yesterday's posting hit a nerve. (Seems at least three people agree with me!) What might we be able to accomplish on our projects if we put our attention on learning to increase the relatedness of people on our projects rather than studying for the PMI certification exam? Does anyone really think that doing better work breakdown structures will make our projects successful? No one. That's what I thought. How about learning to repair trust between two important team members? Now that would make a difference. Not the role of a project manager, you say? Then who's role is it?

It's time we stopped acting like good technical wisdom is what makes for good project management. It doesn't. Likewise, accountability, authority, and responsibility (someone needs to explain the difference between accountability and responsibility for me) don't make a project manager. Let's try care, guidance, attention, listening, and openness. Now we're getting somewhere!

I recognize my mood in writing this is somewhat impertinent. Frankly, I'm doing my best not to scream. (It would wake the dogs.) We must shift our conversation about project management from the things we do to the people we do it with. Only when we put people at the center of projects can we have the fantastic environments that projects are for our clients, for us and our team mates, and our companies.
[Reforming Project Management]

I missed the original post in my aggregator but agree strongly with what is said here. One of the key things I have learned over the last year or so is that it is people that do valuable things and they don't do them on their own.

To take my own example, my productivity has soared since I started collaborating with Paolo and Simone of evectors. It's not our technical knowledge that has delivered this, it's the new interactions that we can provoke & sustain in each other. The whole definitely is greater than the sum of it's parts.

We're looking at ways in which K-Collector can help to connect people together in organsiations because we think it's a powerful tool.

Relationships are multi-valent

Mon, 15 Sep 2003 09:17:35 +0100

Granularities of relationships.

September 14, 2003

Codifying Relationships
- Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

One of the problems that plagues the YASNSes (as Clay calls the growing number of social networking systems) is how to define or codify relationships.

On the one hand, trying to make all relationships equal and bidirectional, as Friendster and LinkedIn currently do, is clearly problematic. As I wrote on Joi Itos LinkedIn wiki page:

Id also like to be able to differentiate between (at the minimum) two types of contactsthose whom Im willing to receive referrals from, and those whom Im willing to have make referrals on my behalf. There are far more in the first category than the second. Im more than happy, for example, to have Meg Hourihan or Anil Dash send someone to me. But since I dont have extensive working relationships with either one, Im not sure Id want them to be the first line of introduction for me to someone elsefor that, Id be more comfortable with someone like Joi or Clay Shirky or someone Ive worked more closely with.

But today I was playing with a pre-alpha version of a new system that does in fact allow me to define types of relationships, and as others have pointed out, that has its own set of problems. In the system I was looking at, I was given the following options:

I am a close friend of this person
I am a friend of this person
I am an acquaintance of this person
I know this person (by reputation)
I know this person (in passing)
I am related to this person
I would like to know this person

I was trying to categorize my relationship to another system user, a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Ive met the person at a party, and had a brief conversation, but I have no idea if the person remembers me. Id like to get to know the person better. SoI might be an acquaintance, I do know the person in passing, I definitely know the person by reputation, and I would like to know this person better. What do I choose? (I ended up giving up, btw, and not choosing anything.)

This is where David Weinbergers concerns about making the implicit explicit become most relevant for me. Relationships are complicated. Expressing them algorithmically is terrifically difficult. Reducing the complexity takes something important way from the relationship. And forcing users into these choices without a clear and compelling payoff for doing so (payoff for the users, that isclearly the marketers and demographers get a payoff!) seems doomed to failure. [Many-to-Many]

Marc's response to Liz's post............

My bet is that there WILL be a way to algorithmically express dynamic - changing relationships. Afterall - that's what real life is.

Dynamic, adaptive user experiences are where it's at.

I also bet that this new system Liz is talking about will be able to handle OTHER kinds of challenges presented to the social networking world - like "why would I want someone to link to my FOAF file?" or "what I show to a stranger should be different than what I show to a close friend."

I also have it from a very good source, that this un-named new pre-alpha system will attempt to grapple perhaps the BIGGEST challenge of them all: "how do we inter-connect and share social networks BETWEEN disparate social networks"? You have to imagine aggregating people together, but if 'someone' could do it - that would be totally cool.

[Marc's Voice]

I've thought about this a little and I think the problem here is that the current approaches only tackle half the problem.

It is reasonable to expect that being able to define a relationship in more accurate terms than the simple "friend" is a good thing. Yet in Liz' case the increase in granularity lead to hieghtened indecision and ultimately an inability to make a choice. We know granularity is important, yet further increasing it will lead to more indecision, not less.

My take is that the missing piece is a recognition that relationships are multi-valent. From such a viewpoint statements like:

I know this person (by reputation)
I would like to know this person

do not define a relationship, but name some of it's many characteristics. Being able to choose many of these statements (and you could expand the list of statements considerably) allows you to provide depth and, where necessary, inconsistency to how you view the relationship at that time.

Building quality with faces

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:36:30 +0000

Reality lies somewhere betw Cringely and Ballmer and Linus. How about this. Both guys (Ballmer and Torvalds) make really shitty software. Microsoft, after decades of Windows development still can't make a robust operating system that a normal person can use. And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (a amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere. And the user interface of Linux sucks. Windows isn't totally terrible. It's a huge embarassment that with many billions of dollars, dozens of years, and billions of man-hours, this is the best the human species can produce. [Scripting News]

In reading the Cringely piece I had a sudden vision of how we can get sharp improvements in the quality of Microsoft products without them having to give it away.

Open up the developers.

Linus Torvalds says:

The other reason why free software is better is because the personal reputation of the developer is attached to every release. If you are making something to give away to the world, something that represents to millions of users your philosophy of computing, you will always make it the very best product you can make.

I think he's right. I know the pressure I feel to deliver something good and the pain of failing. I'm not saying that Microsoft programmers don't feel the same things, but they are hidden behind the behemoth they work for. When the pressure to ship gets too great they can, ultimately, acquiesce and nobody will know. There is no public shame.

If these guys were in the spotlight for their work then they could take either the heat or the praise as appropriate. I'd like to see a site at that shows each product, the team who works on it with pictures, bio's, links to weblogs, email and so on. And why stop at Microsoft, lots of people make crappy software (I'll refrain from saying "us too" since you know that already!)

Sure I'd trust Microsoft with my data again...

Tue, 11 Nov 2003 17:20:31 +0000

Good grief I can't even start Outlook now. It opens then immediately runs up to 100% CPU and sits there unresponsive. I'm not even sure it will work to the extent that other clients importers will be able to get the data out. What do I do then?

One thing you can be certain of. I will never buy into a world of Microsoft controlled DRM. They don't build the kind of software that I would trust not to lose my licenses, invalidate my data or lock me out of my system. If this was Outlook + Palladium then doubtless the PST files on my backup CD wouldn't be readable by now either.

I can't wait to say "Good riddance Outlook."

-----------------------

20.30 Update

Sure enough I tried to use Bloomba to import my Outlook mail and no go. It spent 2 hrs twiddling it's thumbs while Outlook just looked on and laughed it's fiendish laugh. My next step will be to do a final backup and then attempt to re-install Outlook so that I can export my mail archives into another application.

What a drag.

Mistaken Identity

Fri, 14 May 2004 17:36:08 +0100

The Stand are stepping up to the plate on ID Card starting with an event on May 19th

Mistaken Identity

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card

Wednesday May 19, 2004; 13:3017:00 hrs

The Old Theatre, London School of Economics
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE

Organised by Privacy International, in association with Liberty, Statewatch, Stand.org.uk, The Register, The 1990 Trust and the Foundation for Information Policy Research. Hosted by the Department of Information Systems of the London School of Economics

The government has introduced draft legislation for a national identity card. The card system will cost at least £3 billion and is likely to become an essential part of life for everyone residing in the UK.

If the draft legislation is accepted by Parliament, everyone will be required to register for a card. Biometric scans of the face, fingers and eye will be taken. Personal details will be stored in a central database. A unique number will be issued that will become the basis for the matching of computer systems.

The proposed card may be required to access vital public services and to receive benefits. The government proposes to enforce the programme through numerous new criminal and civil offenses, including provision for unlimited financial penalty and up to ten years' imprisonment.

The implications for everyone in the UK are far-reaching.

Join us at this important meeting to hear from key figures in the fields of law, politics, security, technology and human rights. Decide for yourself whether this is a plan that should be supported.

The meeting is free of charge.

I'll be going and I hope lots of other people will as well.

Lead me not into disaster

Tue, 25 May 2004 08:14:51 +0100

"Dangerous rhetoric" [Salon.com]

One the quotes I especially liked from that piece was:

Conservative columnist George F. Will: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts."

Why are politicians so incapable of admitting error? It's going to lead us into disaster after disaster. This, blind, "no turning back!", "damn the torpedos full steam ahead!" mentality is so full of shit and I'm sick of it.

Real truth is always subversive

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 13:00:51 +0100

John Pilger gave a talk recently about journalism as a tool of the state. The way the US and British states have gotten away with murder over Iraq is a good case in point. The liberty of not having a television or reading a newspaper (I confess I do still occasionally listen to Radio4 news bulletins as I wake-up) has given me a distance from the mainstream media that I have never enjoyed before.

During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. The dissident novelist Zdenek Urbánek told me, "In one respect, we are more fortunate than you in the west. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. Unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines, because real truth is always subversive."

Since the late 80's my skepticism about what I am told has grown and grown. I think that I believed not one word of what was reported in the build-up to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

On 24 August last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that the invasion would never have happened if journalists had not betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them.

I am getting all my news online and from voices (such as John Pilger). On Wednesday Euan talked about how he found watching a documentary so frustrating because of the editorial slant and how reading is so much better for him because he finds it easier to make his mind up. Quoting Pilger again:

Language is perhaps the most crucial battleground. Noble words such as "democracy," "liberation," "freedom" and "reform" have been emptied of their true meaning and refilled by the enemies of those concepts. The counterfeits dominate the news, along with dishonest political labels, such as "left of center," a favorite given to warlords such as Blair and Bill Clinton; it means the opposite. "War on terror" is a fake metaphor that insults our intelligence. We are not at war. Instead, our troops are fighting insurrections in countries where our invasions have caused mayhem and grief, the evidence and images of which are suppressed.

When we read we have a much greater capacity to understand the language being used and its effect upon us. In particular I believe we have a greater capacity to understand it's emotional effect upon as and so understand when we are being manipulated.

Further by reading authentic voices I can take what I know about that person and adjust my filters accordingly when I try to understand what they are saying. For example anyone who reads my weblog on even a semi-regular basis must have a fairly good idea of my views, the trajectory along which they are changing, and the pace.

If I think I know where I am going philosophically I guess you probably know it even better. And from that you will know my weaknesses and my blind spots and adjust accordingly (and even tell me about it sometimes, please?!)

As long as the media remain a compliant tool of the state I shall shun them and their tainted product.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on reputation-trust

The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts

Relationships are multi-valent

September 14, 2003

Codifying Relationships - Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

Building quality with faces

Sure I'd trust Microsoft with my data again...

Mistaken Identity

Mistaken Identity

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card

Lead me not into disaster

Real truth is always subversive

Codifying Relationships
- Posted by Liz Lawley at 2:22 PM

A public meeting on the Governments proposed National Identity Card