How should one run open source or open content projects? Some sort of governance is needed. And, partly swayed by a recent trip to St. Gallen, the Swiss approach to democracy seems pretty close to being tailor-made.

As Wikipedia says,

“Switzerland is a federal republic, and perhaps the closest state in the world to a direct democracy. For any change in the constitution, a referendum is mandatory; for any change in a law, a referendum can be requested. In practice, the people have the last word in every change of law some interest group disagrees with.”

So in the canton of St Gallen, any citizen receives a pamphlet every three months or so. This pamphlet includes one or two country-wide laws, and three or four canton-wide laws that are being proposed. Again, should you wish to propose a law yourself, as long as you have a requisite amount of names on a petition, the government needs to propose this law to the nation.

So far so good. And there seem to be some wonderful “emergent behaviours” out of all of this, certainly if the conversations I had are anything to go by.

1. Politicians do not parade their egos.
   Because control is basically in the hand of the people, politicians are increasingly involved in the little decisions, but less so in the larger ones. Perhaps this is just a biased view given the current UK elections, but less ego sounds very healthy
2. Citizens are politically engaged.
   Because they are given some measure of control, they apparently talk through many of the issues amongst themselves in a much more practical way. Giving them responsibility seems to have worked.

There are some “but’s”, though.

1. Isolation.
   Newcomers and residents pay taxes for a long time before they are allowed the vote (or citizenship). While this is in some measure to protect the constitution, if wages weren’t so good, then it would seem to be a strong disincentive to join.
2. Innovation.
   It’s easy and slightly trite to say that innovation is stifled (a la Orson Welles, cuckoo clocks and peace). That said, lack of citizen ‘churn’ might well concern me if I was wanting to apply the system to an open source initiative

Anyway, certainly at first glance it seemed like a great possible model from which to learn how to run an open source initiative. And interestingly, in a recent interview at OpenEnterpriseTrends.com, Jack O’Brien (Sun’s Group Manager: x86 and Operating Systems) was asked about plans for the Open Source Solaris project. He said that

“All these Open Source communities have a governance process. So [when we announce Open Source Solaris], we�ll begin with an initial governance process, just to get started. But, we want the community, not Sun the company, to take ownership for what that governance process looks like.”

Very Swiss.

April 29th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on governance, open source, policy, politics, software Switzerland

Following on from last post about trying to work some of the benefits of internet CoPs into intranet CoPs, there’s some interesting reading over at Shawn Callahan’s Anecdote blog. Shawn did some work on this while at IBM (as far as I can gather) and had some interesting things to say about community formation.

the activity must be easy compared to the output created

the output must be appreciated

the appreciation should lead to an outcome that satisfies a need

These hurdles provide us three perspectives for developing simple rules for community formation.

Andy Boyd makes a great point on anonymity and giving in commercial and non-commercial CoPs. While looking around the Lego Robot Kit CoP, he said he was

“amazed at how much effort some people go to to help others (some guy has written an 150 page coding handbook for the kids to improve their structured programming). Gee we never get that amount of effort applied in our work CoPs.

That difference is very apparent with CoPs on the internet and the anonymity of the INTERNET, us intra netters can never hide behind such smoke screens or rely on the huge enthusiasm of such kind hearted people (or as I said before maybe they are Johny No Mates?)

It makes many comparisons between CoPs in business (on Intranets) and Internet communities very limited. Pity many of the consultants and know alls in this field have not spotted this difference.”

Made me wonder. And the more I wondered the more my head hurt. How does one go about getting that sort of Lego-manual fervour in Intranet-based CoPs? Anonymity? Can’t really see that working. Short of making sure that the cost to the employee’s minimised (time/money/getting raised eyebrows from colleagues at lack of social life etc) I’m a bit stumped. And I’m not sure a cup of blackcurrant bracer is going to help.

April 25th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on business, community, openness scale

What if, as part of the human condition, we naturally underperform when trying to solve problems together?

There’s a fascinating paper by Lu Hong and Scott E. Page called “Diversity and optimality”[PDF]. As they say in the abstract,

In this paper, we construct a general model of cognitively diverse problem solvers. We use this model to derive two main results: (1) a collection of cognitively diverse problem solvers can locate optimal solutions to difficult problems and (2) a collection of diverse problem solvers with limited abilities tends to outperform a collection of high ability problem solvers, where a problem solver’s ability equals her expected individual performance
[thanks to Dennis Pearce over at AOK for the pointer]

In other words, to have a great problem solving team, you need talent, yes, but you also need diversity.

This seems to sit very uneasily with homophily and the whole “birds of a feather flocking together” shebang. For reference, here are some views from sociology and psychiatry/psychology.

“attitude, belief and value similarity lead to attraction and interaction.”

- McPherson, Miller; Smith-Lovin; Cook. 2001. “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks.” Annual Review of Sociology 27: 415-444.

And from the same piece, while “similarity breeds connection,” it also seems to hold that “Ties between nonsimilar individuals … dissolve at a higher rate.” From the psychology field, a quick browse turned up this:

People who suffer from the same problems tend to seek together, either unconsciously or for support. Once to many, I’ve seen people who have the same problem refuse to confront it, and as a result actually accelerate each other’s psychopathology.

This occurs relatively fast and is one of the reasons why group therapy may be very effective. In group therapy, the interaction between people and their symptoms are supervised by the therapist, who (hopefully) will confront the clients when appropriate.

And lastly, as Dennis Pearce was (again)quoted as saying last September,

(Tom) Allen also found that the engineers he surveyed got their knowledge from the sources that were easiest and most familiar to them, not the ones that were most reliable or accurate, even when they themselves were aware of this. In other words, they knowingly sacrificed accuracy for expediency.

[thanks Suw for the pointer]

[The work in question is Allen, T. (1977). Managing the Flow of Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.]

In short, to optimise our group problem-solving we need to make sure our groups are diverse, but nature, or rather our natures, shoot us in our feet.

Other random associated thoughts, if not particularly thought out, and references:
read on »

April 22nd 2005 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on Brains, Creativity, groups, networks problems

Just seen that all my toiling and grinding to make sense of things has been summed up over at “Mash Up” as follows:

The lieutenant borrowed this remarkable map and had a secret Ninja squad, and I see no reason why this shouldn’t apply to feeds

Made me smile, but I was a little bit confused, though obviously delighted at the pithy precis and investigated further. Gell Anderson (?) Saurier explained the point of the mashing as follows:

A while ago I developed a tool which transforms the spam I recieve into aleatoric sugar. This little experiment takes the input from blogs I like.

Well it’s definitely aleatoric. The sugar for me came from seeing something truly random - it put what I see in my aggregator each morning into sharp relief.

If God doesn’t play dice with the universe (that is if), then I think it’s fair to say the we, as humans, don’t play dice with words. I’m not sure we even can. Which means that, for all the weird, complex, confusing things you see out there, they all have a bit of “soul”.

April 22nd 2005 | Comments(1) | Life on blogs soul

… were charming and very helpful when I finally got through to them, but it took me ages to find a number! Their site seems to be designed in such a way that the “contact us” page is effectively a help page - no numbers, no email addresses, just “have you tried this page?”. Grr.

Anyway, for future reference, and in a vain effort to alleviate high blood pressure, here is their number for the UK:

Freephone (only from within the UK): 0800 279 6620

If you’re having similar problems, this bloke at cliche ideas seems to be single handedly championing the cause for getting in touch with faceless companies.

From John Seddon, a business psychologist with a knack of putting things succinctly:

“People do what you count, not what counts. Targets always make things worse.”

Wall Street financier Sir John Templeton has some wise words:

The four most dangerous words in investment are: “It’s different this time”

Wonder how much that applies to social software and organisational behaviours?

April 18th 2005 | Comments(2) | Notes on hype, Quotes risk

A while ago I posted on the what is effectively the mathematics of sex. Well, so as not to get to Hippolytian about it all and keep a balance I thought I’d comment that over at Edge.org they’re now following up on the mathematics of love wih an interview with John Gottman. It’s an interesting talk (there’s a video interview too). As he says,

I look at relationships. What’s different about what I do, compared with most psychologists, is that for me the relationship is the unit, rather than the person. What I focus on is a very ephemeral thing, which is what happens between people when they interact. It’s not either person, it’s something that happens when they’re together. It is like a structure that they’re building by the way they interact. And I think of it that way, almost like a fleeting architectural fluid form that people are creating as they talk to each other, as they smile, as they move.

I suppose I feel it’s great to use this sort of thing to diagnose what went wrong, but less clever to use it as a guide to who to go with. Put one way, the end may justify the means, but the means qualifies the end, and measuring and the maths affects the means.

Have just returned from a muchos refreshing break in Cap Begur - how different life is without online access!

One of the better holiday reads was Anthony Burgess‘ Enderby series. (If you don’t know the books, Enderby is a hapless, balding, toothless middle-aged poet who writes his best work on the lavatory. He is hounded by women, and has chronic dyspepsia thanks in part to the psychological damage inflicted on him by his step-mother).

Anyway, one page got dog-eared for the following bit.

Enderby, thanks to his unwitting involvement in a notorious sex-film, has been invited to be a visiting professor of poetry by a US College and is managing to insult nearly everyone.

One of his callers, who had once termed him a toothless cocksucker (that toothlessness had been right, anyway, at that time anyway), was always threatening to bring a tomahawk to 91st Street and Columbus Avenue, which was where Enderby lodged. Also students would ring anonymously at deliberately awkward hours to revile him for his various faults - chauvinism, or some such thing; ignorance of literary figures important to the young; failure to see merit in their own free verse and gutter vocabulary. They would revile him also in class, of course, but not so freely as on the telephone. Everybody felt naked these days without the mediacy of a mechanical mode of communication.

It was that last sentence that I thought merited the dog-ear. And as serendipity had it, a couple of hours after the dog-ear my cliff-path walk took me past a nudist beach. Not a phone in site.

Seems to me that individuals are increasingly outgrowing the organisation. Expectations are aimed at fuller, richer lives, at travel, at the pursuit of interests, and at freedom of routine. And we expect organisations somehow to support us in this.

Put another way, by one Frederick the Great:

If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.

There’s been a recent debate in Parliament about online communities and media. It’s worth a skim I think. Nice to see some awareness of the control problem, esp. from Vincent Cable, MP for Twickenham.

“A second problem for community web sites was raised by Dr. Cable, namely the increasing tendency of local authorities to seek to create their own community web sites. He said, “They are developed in-house by IT departments of local councils and they are in competition with genuine voluntary community websites. I cannot speak for all of those, but certainly the perception that I have from people in the field is that often the products of local government are not of good quality, and even if they are of good quality they have an official flavour to them. They quickly acquire a vested interest.”

He warned about a protectionist flavour developing and councillors becoming nervous of community web site because they no longer control the news media, as they used to be able to. The community websites are then seen as a problem by the local councils, which in turn promote their own system in competition with them using Government funding.”

- Source: ChiswickW4.com