Today while coming to office, a very old lady has requested me to help her in crossing the road and I dutifully did that has have a very different impact all through the day... A sense of strange happiness of helping someone...
Out of all people crossing over her, something must be there to prompt her to ask help from me...
Hmmm... a real sense of happiness...
Likewise few days ago I donated few bucks to another very aged grand-ma who was begging in the road... that day too I had this same sensation of satisfaction...
Also daily I'm seeing an old lady sitting under a tree on the way I used reach the Chepauk railway station attracts my attention..... she must be left alone without any to help her... very dis heartening to see how bad people are treated in their homes and society(which includes me) having no-care attitude towards those most needed people...
I'm sure the day, sorry the time I get the disposable income in my hand will saw a new beginning of service organization which may be handled by me if possible or through someone to serve this most needed people...
Until then I wish her and people like her have at least a peaceful life if not a comfortable life...
Showing posts with label My Interests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label My Interests. Show all posts
Friday, October 26, 2007
Thursday, October 25, 2007
An Anti Firefox Evangelist Destined To Be Doomed
In lieu of the increasing usage of Firefox browser and in some European countries Firefox has beaten IE in many counts, Firefox going to be in-determinable force in near future. But few people still don't realize the potential of Firefox. They think their voice heavily biased for one or other reason will take Firefox out of Internet users. Hmmm... no fool who realized the power would goto IE again. A column writer has simply blocked the Firefox users just because they use FF which in-turn has an add-on called (controversial according to them) AdBlock Plus.
Adblock plus is one the most popular add-on for Firefox which gives users un-obstructive browsing experience by blocking the intrusive ads(sadly most ads fall in this line and are needed to be removed)...
Here is the story given by a columnist Grant Buckler on ITBusiness.com,
Hey, you there, reading this column. Yeah, punk, I mean you.
Have you looked at every advertisement in this paper?
You haven't? You thief! How dare you steal my work! This publication exists to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Reading our content without looking at the advertising, therefore, is no less than stealing.
Firefox users who go to http://jacklewis.net/weblog/ are redirected to http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/index1.php, which says the Adblock Plus[http://adblockplus.org/en/] extension undercuts Web sites dependent on advertising revenue.
“Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing,” wrote Danny Carlton, a Web site designer and author, who runs both sites. JackLewis.net is his personal blog site. “Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software,” he added in a posting on the Why Firefox is Blocked Web site.
And if you've been fast-forwarding TV commercials, you're just as guilty. Heck, if you've been getting a beer during commercials, it's no different. You're still a crook. I'll bet you sometimes even toss the flyers that come with your newspaper into the recycling bin without looking at them.
Oh, and you sent your Aunt Edith a postcard last week, yet you didn't read the junk mail you found in your mailbox? Don't you realize that without its revenues from delivering that junk mail, Canada Post couldn't possibly deliver your postcard for only 51 cents?
Okay, relax. I'm not serious. Yes, the publisher of CDN makes its money from the advertising, but that does not obligate you to look at the ads. The model works because enough readers do look at enough ads that advertisers get their money's worth. The same is true of television.
And the same is true of the web. Somebody needs to explain that to Danny Carlton.
Carlton is a blogger. You can't read his blog using the Firefox web browser. If you try, you get redirected to a page titled “Why Firefox is Blocked,” which explains that because a popular Firefox add-on called Ad Block Plus makes it possible to block online advertising, Carlton has blocked Firefox access to his site to prevent what he calls theft.
“Numerous websites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads,” the page says. “Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.”
Let's see if I understand this. You make an assortment of content publicly accessible. I look at the part of it that interests me, and ignore the part that doesn't. That makes me a thief - in spite of the fact that people have been ignoring advertising for as long as it has existed.
Yes, if nobody looks at ads, ad-supported websites won't be viable. Judging from the success of Google - a company that derives 99 per cent of its revenue from online advertising - this isn't a clear and present danger.
And if the online advertising business is really worried about ad-blocking, it should look in the mirror. When an online ad jumps out of its place and blocks my view of what I'm reading, or when the casual movement of my cursor across an ad causes my computer to start blaring noise at me, I start thinking ad-blocking software might be a good idea.
And thanks to Danny Carlton, I've now got some. I hadn't really heard about AdBlock Plus before, but when I read about his tirade, I had to check it out. It works quite nicely, and you can find it at www.adblock.com.
[funny quote of this author about Danny Carlton]
Oh by the way, I also pointed Internet Explorer at Carlton's blog to see what other opinions he has. Among the posts there: rants against “socialized medicine,” the American Civil Liberties Union and the theory of evolution. Now I'm looking for software to block the content and leave the ads.
Adblock plus is one the most popular add-on for Firefox which gives users un-obstructive browsing experience by blocking the intrusive ads(sadly most ads fall in this line and are needed to be removed)...
Here is the story given by a columnist Grant Buckler on ITBusiness.com,
Hey, you there, reading this column. Yeah, punk, I mean you.
Have you looked at every advertisement in this paper?
You haven't? You thief! How dare you steal my work! This publication exists to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Reading our content without looking at the advertising, therefore, is no less than stealing.
Firefox users who go to http://jacklewis.net/weblog/ are redirected to http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com/index1.php, which says the Adblock Plus[http://adblockplus.org/en/] extension undercuts Web sites dependent on advertising revenue.
“Accessing the content while blocking the ads therefore would be no less than stealing,” wrote Danny Carlton, a Web site designer and author, who runs both sites. JackLewis.net is his personal blog site. “Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software,” he added in a posting on the Why Firefox is Blocked Web site.
And if you've been fast-forwarding TV commercials, you're just as guilty. Heck, if you've been getting a beer during commercials, it's no different. You're still a crook. I'll bet you sometimes even toss the flyers that come with your newspaper into the recycling bin without looking at them.
Oh, and you sent your Aunt Edith a postcard last week, yet you didn't read the junk mail you found in your mailbox? Don't you realize that without its revenues from delivering that junk mail, Canada Post couldn't possibly deliver your postcard for only 51 cents?
Okay, relax. I'm not serious. Yes, the publisher of CDN makes its money from the advertising, but that does not obligate you to look at the ads. The model works because enough readers do look at enough ads that advertisers get their money's worth. The same is true of television.
And the same is true of the web. Somebody needs to explain that to Danny Carlton.
Carlton is a blogger. You can't read his blog using the Firefox web browser. If you try, you get redirected to a page titled “Why Firefox is Blocked,” which explains that because a popular Firefox add-on called Ad Block Plus makes it possible to block online advertising, Carlton has blocked Firefox access to his site to prevent what he calls theft.
“Numerous websites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads,” the page says. “Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing.”
Let's see if I understand this. You make an assortment of content publicly accessible. I look at the part of it that interests me, and ignore the part that doesn't. That makes me a thief - in spite of the fact that people have been ignoring advertising for as long as it has existed.
Yes, if nobody looks at ads, ad-supported websites won't be viable. Judging from the success of Google - a company that derives 99 per cent of its revenue from online advertising - this isn't a clear and present danger.
And if the online advertising business is really worried about ad-blocking, it should look in the mirror. When an online ad jumps out of its place and blocks my view of what I'm reading, or when the casual movement of my cursor across an ad causes my computer to start blaring noise at me, I start thinking ad-blocking software might be a good idea.
And thanks to Danny Carlton, I've now got some. I hadn't really heard about AdBlock Plus before, but when I read about his tirade, I had to check it out. It works quite nicely, and you can find it at www.adblock.com.
[funny quote of this author about Danny Carlton]
Oh by the way, I also pointed Internet Explorer at Carlton's blog to see what other opinions he has. Among the posts there: rants against “socialized medicine,” the American Civil Liberties Union and the theory of evolution. Now I'm looking for software to block the content and leave the ads.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Threat To Hardcore Programmers???
The worst nightmare of any programmer would be of jobless and not able to code with real goals. Since considering the current trend of IT demands, it is a remote possibility of such happening. But that was the case until I read this shocking article about the imminent threat to programming community who lives solely by writing some stupid, unformatted, deliberately crypt ed variables and function logics to keep the business people scared all time and putting them at bay even though it's possible to write very legible code with modern programming languages which has implementation purely based on the English language constructs.
But all this seems to be in trouble due to an revolutionary work being carried out by "Charles Simonyi" who was creator of Bravo (1974), Microsoft Word (1983), Microsoft Excel (1985), Intentional Software (2007, first release) softwares. He is now working on creating an automatic programming code generation software which is hoping to replace the cruel programmers and giving relief to Business people who can easily convert their plans into actions using his software.
Now have a look at what he is actually doing,
This fall the business world will see the first tentative release of a product that Charles Simonyi has been working on, in one form or another, for most of his professional life. No, it's not word-processing software, which the Hungarian immigrant developed at Xerox PARC and then took to Microsoft in 1981, and which helped build him a fortune estimated at $1 billion. It's more audacious than that.
Simonyi's five-year-old startup, Intentional Software, is making software so smart that you can simply tell it what you want to do. Lay down a few basic parameters, and it will write its own code. No programming skills are necessary.
"Experts [in other fields] can be much more innovative and responsive to their business, and see the resulting software immediately," says Simonyi, speaking from the deck of his yacht, one of the world's largest.
Humans, arguably, have done a pretty lousy job of writing code. Derailed software projects have shamed plenty of large companies. (See "When Bugs Attack," right.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology says such bugs cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion each year.
"The nature of programming is that you make mistakes," says Jonathan Edwards, a research fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "No one ever gets it right, and people have concluded this is as good as it's going to get."
Not Simonyi, who has always believed that software should do the heavy lifting for people. After all, we were staring at command-line prompts on green screens until he and his fellow Xerox engineers came up with the graphical user interface.
At Microsoft in 1995, after building the entire Office suite, Simonyi tried to go one level of simplicity further, with the programming equivalent of point-and-click. The project became an obsession and, seven years later, a startup. Simonyi threw out his code and started from scratch twice before he was satisfied. (He also found time to take a $20 million jaunt on the International Space Station in April.)
Intentional's technology centers on the Domain Workbench, a human-language and graphically friendly representation of the software as it's built. Much as blogging platforms like Blogger and TypePad gave millions of Web surfers the power to publish their own sites while ignoring all that pesky HTML code, the Domain Workbench would hand enterprise software design to businesspeople.
Here's how it works: Users write clear directions in text, spreadsheet, or flowchart-like forms describing what the software should do. In some cases, they can use an interface where lines are drawn between boxes and documents to establish the relationships and rules that an application must follow.
The information is sent to a code generator, which spits out the thousands of lines necessary to build the application. Intentional users must still have a software engineer on hand to help set up the programming language and to tweak it anytime a variable changes.
Henk Kolk, CTO at Capgemini, a Paris-based IT services firm and an Intentional client, says Domain Workbench is a godsend. A project that would previously have required 50 programmers working for five years, he estimates, could be completed with Intentional in "just a couple of months."
Kolk is running three pilot projects using the system, and this fall Capgemini plans to release a Domain Workbench aimed specifically at its pension firm clients. "We created a domain language for the pension world that is immediately understood and usable by those experts," Kolk says. "I'm a believer that businesspeople should be able to express what they want to do and generate software directly from that."
There's a healthy dose of skepticism in the programming community that Intentional will accomplish its goal. IBM and Cornell set up similar systems that were shunned by programmers. And MIT's Edwards is dubious of Intentional's attempt to patent its system in an age when open-source rules. "It feels archaic, frankly, to have all of this secrecy, the patents and NDAs," he says of Intentional, which has thus far released few technical details. "The only way you have an influence today is by giving it away."
Simonyi says he's "willing to take the risk" that owning the platform may slow its adoption. He's betting programmers don't enjoy working on the business aspects of software development - pension rules or HIPAA legislation, for example - and "will be delighted by the separation from the drudgery."
Some programmers agree. "Software's job isn't to be well written and cool," says Andrew Brooman, a 25-year programming veteran in Florida. "Its job is to solve business problems." If he's right, Simonyi's Microsoft wealth could be just the beginning of an even greater fortune.
Source: http://money.cnn.com
Hmmm... I need to think of some contingency plans in place in-case such situations comes alarmingly big... Any suggestions?
But all this seems to be in trouble due to an revolutionary work being carried out by "Charles Simonyi" who was creator of Bravo (1974), Microsoft Word (1983), Microsoft Excel (1985), Intentional Software (2007, first release) softwares. He is now working on creating an automatic programming code generation software which is hoping to replace the cruel programmers and giving relief to Business people who can easily convert their plans into actions using his software.
Now have a look at what he is actually doing,
This fall the business world will see the first tentative release of a product that Charles Simonyi has been working on, in one form or another, for most of his professional life. No, it's not word-processing software, which the Hungarian immigrant developed at Xerox PARC and then took to Microsoft in 1981, and which helped build him a fortune estimated at $1 billion. It's more audacious than that.
Simonyi's five-year-old startup, Intentional Software, is making software so smart that you can simply tell it what you want to do. Lay down a few basic parameters, and it will write its own code. No programming skills are necessary.
"Experts [in other fields] can be much more innovative and responsive to their business, and see the resulting software immediately," says Simonyi, speaking from the deck of his yacht, one of the world's largest.
Humans, arguably, have done a pretty lousy job of writing code. Derailed software projects have shamed plenty of large companies. (See "When Bugs Attack," right.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology says such bugs cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion each year.
"The nature of programming is that you make mistakes," says Jonathan Edwards, a research fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "No one ever gets it right, and people have concluded this is as good as it's going to get."
Not Simonyi, who has always believed that software should do the heavy lifting for people. After all, we were staring at command-line prompts on green screens until he and his fellow Xerox engineers came up with the graphical user interface.
At Microsoft in 1995, after building the entire Office suite, Simonyi tried to go one level of simplicity further, with the programming equivalent of point-and-click. The project became an obsession and, seven years later, a startup. Simonyi threw out his code and started from scratch twice before he was satisfied. (He also found time to take a $20 million jaunt on the International Space Station in April.)
Intentional's technology centers on the Domain Workbench, a human-language and graphically friendly representation of the software as it's built. Much as blogging platforms like Blogger and TypePad gave millions of Web surfers the power to publish their own sites while ignoring all that pesky HTML code, the Domain Workbench would hand enterprise software design to businesspeople.
Here's how it works: Users write clear directions in text, spreadsheet, or flowchart-like forms describing what the software should do. In some cases, they can use an interface where lines are drawn between boxes and documents to establish the relationships and rules that an application must follow.
The information is sent to a code generator, which spits out the thousands of lines necessary to build the application. Intentional users must still have a software engineer on hand to help set up the programming language and to tweak it anytime a variable changes.
Henk Kolk, CTO at Capgemini, a Paris-based IT services firm and an Intentional client, says Domain Workbench is a godsend. A project that would previously have required 50 programmers working for five years, he estimates, could be completed with Intentional in "just a couple of months."
Kolk is running three pilot projects using the system, and this fall Capgemini plans to release a Domain Workbench aimed specifically at its pension firm clients. "We created a domain language for the pension world that is immediately understood and usable by those experts," Kolk says. "I'm a believer that businesspeople should be able to express what they want to do and generate software directly from that."
There's a healthy dose of skepticism in the programming community that Intentional will accomplish its goal. IBM and Cornell set up similar systems that were shunned by programmers. And MIT's Edwards is dubious of Intentional's attempt to patent its system in an age when open-source rules. "It feels archaic, frankly, to have all of this secrecy, the patents and NDAs," he says of Intentional, which has thus far released few technical details. "The only way you have an influence today is by giving it away."
Simonyi says he's "willing to take the risk" that owning the platform may slow its adoption. He's betting programmers don't enjoy working on the business aspects of software development - pension rules or HIPAA legislation, for example - and "will be delighted by the separation from the drudgery."
Some programmers agree. "Software's job isn't to be well written and cool," says Andrew Brooman, a 25-year programming veteran in Florida. "Its job is to solve business problems." If he's right, Simonyi's Microsoft wealth could be just the beginning of an even greater fortune.
Source: http://money.cnn.com
Hmmm... I need to think of some contingency plans in place in-case such situations comes alarmingly big... Any suggestions?
An Uncomfortable Wishing
We might have faced a situation like being in the receiving end of getting a unwanted wishes. Though we know the wishes was just formality and not full heartedly we don't have any other option other than just listening. Like this exactly happened to India when it got the wishes from the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.
Here is the excerpt of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao interview talking about India's growing strength,
Friendship was the “mainstream of China-India relations,” he emphasised, pointing out that in more than 2,000 years of friendly ties, “times of unpleasant memories” lasted two to three years only.
In a rare gesture, the Chinese leader received a PTI correspondent Anil Joseph to bid him farewell on his posting back to India after an 11-year stint here.
“This is the first time for me to have a one-to-one meeting with a correspondent to bid farewell. That is why today I wish to speak from my heart, away from all those usual protocols,” he said.
Mr. Wen also spoke about growing ties with India, stressing that the development of the two countries “are each others’ opportunity rather than a threat.”
Looking forward to the expected visit of his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, to China later this year, Mr. Wen indicated that a red carpet welcome awaited the Indian leader.
Describing the visit as a “big event,” the Premier said, “we are now making vigorous preparations for the visit to ensure that it will be a success.” Mr. Wen said, “Prime Minister Singh and I have said before that when the two of us shake hands, the eyes of the entire world are onus.
“We wish the Indian people happiness and India prosperity. We also wish continued progress in the friendly relations and cooperation between China and India.”
Source: http://www.thehindu.com
Here is the excerpt of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao interview talking about India's growing strength,
Friendship was the “mainstream of China-India relations,” he emphasised, pointing out that in more than 2,000 years of friendly ties, “times of unpleasant memories” lasted two to three years only.
In a rare gesture, the Chinese leader received a PTI correspondent Anil Joseph to bid him farewell on his posting back to India after an 11-year stint here.
“This is the first time for me to have a one-to-one meeting with a correspondent to bid farewell. That is why today I wish to speak from my heart, away from all those usual protocols,” he said.
Mr. Wen also spoke about growing ties with India, stressing that the development of the two countries “are each others’ opportunity rather than a threat.”
Looking forward to the expected visit of his Indian counterpart, Manmohan Singh, to China later this year, Mr. Wen indicated that a red carpet welcome awaited the Indian leader.
Describing the visit as a “big event,” the Premier said, “we are now making vigorous preparations for the visit to ensure that it will be a success.” Mr. Wen said, “Prime Minister Singh and I have said before that when the two of us shake hands, the eyes of the entire world are onus.
“We wish the Indian people happiness and India prosperity. We also wish continued progress in the friendly relations and cooperation between China and India.”
Source: http://www.thehindu.com
Monday, August 27, 2007
Is Web 2.0 Just Hype??
Is the much talked about Web 2.0 is all but just hype??? Definitely Me or people who discuss in a closed cabin cannot take a decision about how far Web 2.0 help rejuvenate the now ill fated dot-com companies help retain their pre-Y2K era popularity. But certainly detailed study and string facts can throw us some light which is what exactly the BBC has tried by having a special story about recent start-ups which are mainly into Web 2.0 technologies in its interesting technology program Click.
Here is excerpts from the BBC program,
Silicon Valley is the southern part of San Francisco's Bay Area, stretching from the city to San Jose. This is one of the top research and development centres in the world; wherever you look someone is having a good idea.
According to the Wall Street Journal, half of the 20 most inventive towns in the US are in Silicon Valley.
Here is excerpts from the BBC program,
Silicon Valley is the southern part of San Francisco's Bay Area, stretching from the city to San Jose. This is one of the top research and development centres in the world; wherever you look someone is having a good idea.
According to the Wall Street Journal, half of the 20 most inventive towns in the US are in Silicon Valley.
Nowadays the place is not just about silicon chip makers; all technology is here.
It is a string of satellite towns full of clever people, incredibly successful tech companies, and hopefuls looking to make the big time.
This place was the centre of the dotcom bubble of the mid 90s, when investors were pouring money into anything with a dot in the title. Of course it was also the hardest hit when the bubble burst. For every surviving big player, hundreds went under.
Now the optimism is back, along with the money.
Cash call
Each week there are meetings, networking events and presentations in which hopeful start-ups attempt to garner interest from investors.
Vincent Lauria, Tech meetup organiser said: "Hi-tech meetups have actually grown phenomenally. We started out pretty small, six people first met up. We met every month and kept growing gradually, bigger and bigger until it hit critical mass and started growing on its own.
"We are now over 1,500 people," he said.
"I try to pick companies that either I feel are on a very good course to do well, or have a really unique idea that nobody else is really touching."
It is often the simple things that take off. Take Data Robotics which makes high capacity home storage systems called Drobo.
Geoff Barrall, Data Robotics boss, said: "Today's storage solutions are all very intensive; you have to move data around, you have to copy files, you have to worry about backing up data.
"The Drobo does all of that for you. So once the data is on Drobo it's going to worry about keeping it safe, it's going to worry about letting you add more storage and grow into the future without you having to do anything at all."
Simplifying storage and back-up has tapped into a big market. Data Robotics claims it is selling its $500 (£250) boxes faster than it can make them.
Green machines
It is not just computer technology that folks in the valley are working on. Green technology is winning investors too, said Drew Clark from IBM Capital Ventures.
"I think [one of] the major drivers in today's buzz in Silicon valley is clean tech or energy tech or energy 2.0, whatever we are calling it these days," said Mr Clark.
"If you look at venture capital statistics it is now the third highest place that money is going into.
One of the green innovations dreamed up is a highly efficient solar panel.
The panels produced by SolFocus reflect sunlight to a central point to harness the energy.
Unlike flat panels it means the expensive materials used to convert the energy to electricity are concentrated in one place. SolFocus claims to use 1/1000th of the area needed by flat panels, which keeps the manufacturing costs low.
Gary Conley, SolFocus explained: "These cells have efficiency over double that of the best silicon today. We concentrate the sun 500 times on that small amount of cell, hence the 1000th of the amount of material used, or the expensive part.
"When there is no sun, or you can't see the solar disc, our panels produce zero power. They only produce power in bright sunny locations or when the sun is out."
Contracts have already been signed with the Spanish government for a large scale solar farm in Southern Spain.
Mash-ups
The other boom area is something called mash-ups which build on the crop of richly interactive websites that are part of that nebulous movement called Web 2.0.
This has given us sites such as RateItAll.com, which lets people express their like or dislike of almost anything, and Like.com, which lets you shop by searching for stuff similar to what you have already bought.
"Mash-ups come from hip hop DJs mashing together sounds to create new sounds," said Mr Clark from IBM.
"Web 2.0 really was fundamentally about the web enabling that kind of thing, but not necessarily music but other kinds of content.
"Google went out there with Google Maps and Google Earth and provided the early mash-ups. So a lot of creative people came together and monetised it.
"They basically said real estate listings are boring, so what if we took the text and the geographical coordinates and mash them up on a map so you can actually look at the house and see where it is.
The next big idea could be very local too. In the age of virtual networks many of us know more about Apple than our next door neighbour. Fatdoor.com aims to tell you more - if you are interested.
Although research suggests that fewer than 1% of tech start-ups will be successful in attracting enough cash, it is not hard to see the potential returns if you pick a winner.
Peter Rip, venture capitalist, said: "A lot of the things that I see in web 2.0 are features, they are not really businesses and they are frankly pretty easy to replicate.
"Two people with a couple of computers here in South Park can do a lot of things very quickly, so the risk you have as an investor is to have something unique and differentiate it.
Mr Rip told the story of two developers who had worked on a project for four years before they showed it to him.
"So they had a deep intellectual property and they actually had invented something that wasn't easy to replicate, he said. "That gives them a barrier to go and build a business around it."
Saturday, August 04, 2007
What Is Powering Orkut? Behind The Scenes of Orkut
I recently read an article about the logic behind the "Groups" concept. Though the article is long, in which case I usally graze over the artcile instead of reading it but that is not the case with this. I found it very interesting since the logic behind this can be applied to contemporary grouping tools like Orkut, Yahoo Groups etc... Here is the excerpt from a really long article. It was delivered in a speech by Clay Shirky.
"Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."
In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.
Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.
So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.
This talk is in three parts. The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.
And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.
Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?
So, Part One. The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.
Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."
He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what's going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.
In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.
Now, it's pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like "I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game," it's easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there. But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect. So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I'll use a story from your life. Because even if I don't know you, I know what I'm about to describe has happened to you.
You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.
You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.
The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.
You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.
Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.
So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.
Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.
The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.
This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
There's a great document called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced "We've gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We're not going to get involved in any of that social stuff."
And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don't remember the exact gap of time -- they come back. The wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say: "What we have learned from you whining users is that we can't do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart."
People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.
And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high...."
To continue reading the article please check out Clay Shirky's page.
"Good morning, everybody. I want to talk this morning about social software ...there's a surprise. I want to talk about a pattern I've seen over and over again in social software that supports large and long-lived groups. And that pattern is the pattern described in the title of this talk: "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy."
In particular, I want to talk about what I now think is one of the core challenges for designing large-scale social software. Let me offer a definition of social software, because it's a term that's still fairly amorphous. My definition is fairly simple: It's software that supports group interaction. I also want to emphasize, although that's a fairly simple definition, how radical that pattern is. The Internet supports lots of communications patterns, principally point-to-point and two-way, one-to-many outbound, and many-to-many two-way.
Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported point-to-point two-way. We had telephones, we had the telegraph. We were familiar with technological mediation of those kinds of conversations. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that supported one-way outbound. I could put something on television or the radio, I could publish a newspaper. We had the printing press. So although the Internet does good things for those patterns, they're patterns we knew from before.
Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.
We've had social software for 40 years at most, dated from the Plato BBS system, and we've only had 10 years or so of widespread availability, so we're just finding out what works. We're still learning how to make these kinds of things.
Now, software that supports group interaction is a fundamentally unsatisfying definition in many ways, because it doesn't point to a specific class of technology. If you look at email, it obviously supports social patterns, but it can also support a broadcast pattern. If I'm a spammer, I'm going to mail things out to a million people, but they're not going to be talking to one another, and I'm not going to be talking to them -- spam is email, but it isn't social. If I'm mailing you, and you're mailing me back, we're having point-to-point and two-way conversation, but not one that creates group dynamics.
So email doesn't necessarily support social patterns, group patterns, although it can. Ditto a weblog. If I'm Glenn Reynolds, and I'm publishing something with Comments Off and reaching a million users a month, that's really broadcast. It's interesting that I can do it as a single individual, but the pattern is closer to MSNBC than it is to a conversation. If it's a cluster of half a dozen LiveJournal users, on the other hand, talking about their lives with one another, that's social. So, again, weblogs are not necessarily social, although they can support social patterns.
Nevertheless, I think that definition is the right one, because it recognizes the fundamentally social nature of the problem. Groups are a run-time effect. You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen.
Now, there's a large body of literature saying "We built this software, a group came and used it, and they began to exhibit behaviors that surprised us enormously, so we've gone and documented these behaviors." Over and over and over again this pattern comes up. (I hear Stewart [Brand, of the WELL] laughing.) The WELL is one of those places where this pattern came up over and over again.
This talk is in three parts. The best explanation I have found for the kinds of things that happen when groups of humans interact is psychological research that predates the Internet, so the first part is going to be about W.R. Bion's research, which I will talk about in a moment, research that I believe explains how and why a group is its own worst enemy.
The second part is: Why now? What's going on now that makes this worth thinking about? I think we're seeing a revolution in social software in the current environment that's really interesting.
And third, I want to identify some things, about half a dozen things, in fact, that I think are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.
Part One: How is a group its own worst enemy?
So, Part One. The best explanation I have found for the ways in which this pattern establishes itself, the group is its own worst enemy, comes from a book by W.R. Bion called "Experiences in Groups," written in the middle of the last century.
Bion was a psychologist who was doing group therapy with groups of neurotics. (Drawing parallels between that and the Internet is left as an exercise for the reader.) The thing that Bion discovered was that the neurotics in his care were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy.
There was no overt communication or coordination. But he could see that whenever he would try to do anything that was meant to have an effect, the group would somehow quash it. And he was driving himself crazy, in the colloquial sense of the term, trying to figure out whether or not he should be looking at the situation as: Are these individuals taking action on their own? Or is this a coordinated group?
He could never resolve the question, and so he decided that the unresolvability of the question was the answer. To the question: Do you view groups of people as aggregations of individuals or as a cohesive group, his answer was: "Hopelessly committed to both."
He said that humans are fundamentally individual, and also fundamentally social. Every one of us has a kind of rational decision-making mind where we can assess what's going on and make decisions and act on them. And we are all also able to enter viscerally into emotional bonds with other groups of people that transcend the intellectual aspects of the individual.
In fact, Bion was so convinced that this was the right answer that the image he put on the front cover of his book was a Necker cube, one of those cubes that you can look at and make resolve in one of two ways, but you can never see both views of the cube at the same time. So groups can be analyzed both as collections of individuals and having this kind of emotive group experience.
Now, it's pretty easy to see how groups of people who have formal memberships, groups that have been labeled and named like "I am a member of such-and-such a guild in a massively multi-player online role-playing game," it's easy to see how you would have some kind of group cohesion there. But Bion's thesis is that this effect is much, much deeper, and kicks in much, much sooner than many of us expect. So I want to illustrate this with a story, and to illustrate the illustration, I'll use a story from your life. Because even if I don't know you, I know what I'm about to describe has happened to you.
You are at a party, and you get bored. You say "This isn't doing it for me anymore. I'd rather be someplace else. I'd rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren't here." Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don't leave. You make a decision "I don't like this." If you were in a bookstore and you said "I'm done," you'd walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said "This is boring," you'd walk out.
You're sitting at a party, you decide "I don't like this; I don't want to be here." And then you don't leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.
And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.
This effect is so steady it's sometimes called the paradox of groups. It's obvious that there are no groups without members. But what's less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?
So there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
Now, Bion decided that what he was watching with the neurotics was the group defending itself against his attempts to make the group do what they said they were supposed to do. The group was convened to get better, this group of people was in therapy to get better. But they were defeating that. And he said, there are some very specific patterns that they're entering into to defeat the ostensible purpose of the group meeting together. And he detailed three patterns.
The first is sex talk, what he called, in his mid-century prose, "A group met for pairing off." And what that means is, the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members.
You go on IRC and you scan the channel list, and you say "Oh, I know what that group is about, because I see the channel label." And you go into the group, you will also almost invariably find that it's about sex talk as well. Not necessarily overt. But that is always in scope in human conversations, according to Bion. That is one basic pattern that groups can always devolve into, away from the sophisticated purpose and towards one of these basic purposes.
The second basic pattern that Bion detailed: The identification and vilification of external enemies. This is a very common pattern. Anyone who was around the Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties could see this all the time. If you cared about Linux on the desktop, there was a big list of jobs to do. But you could always instead get a conversation going about Microsoft and Bill Gates. And people would start bleeding from their ears, they would get so mad.
If you want to make it better, there's a list of things to do. It's Open Source, right? Just fix it. "No, no, Microsoft and Bill Gates grrrrr ...", the froth would start coming out. The external enemy -- nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy.
So even if someone isn't really your enemy, identifying them as an enemy can cause a pleasant sense of group cohesion. And groups often gravitate towards members who are the most paranoid and make them leaders, because those are the people who are best at identifying external enemies.
The third pattern Bion identified: Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets. The religious pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique. You can see this pattern on the Internet any day you like. Go onto a Tolkein newsgroup or discussion forum, and try saying "You know, The Two Towers is a little dull. I mean loooong. We didn't need that much description about the forest, because it's pretty much the same forest all the way."
Try having that discussion. On the door of the group it will say: "This is for discussing the works of Tolkein." Go in and try and have that discussion.
Now, in some places people say "Yes, but it needed to, because it had to convey the sense of lassitude," or whatever. But in most places you'll simply be flamed to high heaven, because you're interfering with the religious text.
So these are human patterns that have shown up on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by humans. Bion has identified this possibility of groups sandbagging their sophisticated goals with these basic urges. And what he finally came to, in analyzing this tension, is that group structure is necessary. Robert's Rules of Order are necessary. Constitutions are necessary. Norms, rituals, laws, the whole list of ways that we say, out of the universe of possible behaviors, we're going to draw a relatively small circle around the acceptable ones.
He said the group structure is necessary to defend the group from itself. Group structure exists to keep a group on target, on track, on message, on charter, whatever. To keep a group focused on its own sophisticated goals and to keep a group from sliding into these basic patterns. Group structure defends the group from the action of its own members.
In the Seventies -- this is a pattern that's shown up on the network over and over again -- in the Seventies, a BBS called Communitree launched, one of the very early dial-up BBSes. This was launched when people didn't own computers, institutions owned computers.
Communitree was founded on the principles of open access and free dialogue. "Communitree" -- the name just says "California in the Seventies." And the notion was, effectively, throw off structure and new and beautiful patterns will arise.
And, indeed, as anyone who has put discussion software into groups that were previously disconnected has seen, that does happen. Incredible things happen. The early days of Echo, the early days of usenet, the early days of Lucasfilms Habitat, over and over again, you see all this incredible upwelling of people who suddenly are connected in ways they weren't before.
And then, as time sets in, difficulties emerge. In this case, one of the difficulties was occasioned by the fact that one of the institutions that got hold of some modems was a high school. And who, in 1978, was hanging out in the room with the computer and the modems in it, but the boys of that high school. And the boys weren't terribly interested in sophisticated adult conversation. They were interested in fart jokes. They were interested in salacious talk. They were interested in running amok and posting four-letter words and nyah-nyah-nyah, all over the bulletin board.
And the adults who had set up Communitree were horrified, and overrun by these students. The place that was founded on open access had too much open access, too much openness. They couldn't defend themselves against their own users. The place that was founded on free speech had too much freedom. They had no way of saying "No, that's not the kind of free speech we meant."
But that was a requirement. In order to defend themselves against being overrun, that was something that they needed to have that they didn't have, and as a result, they simply shut the site down.
Now you could ask whether or not the founders' inability to defend themselves from this onslaught, from being overrun, was a technical or a social problem. Did the software not allow the problem to be solved? Or was it the social configuration of the group that founded it, where they simply couldn't stomach the idea of adding censorship to protect their system. But in a way, it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined. There's no way to completely separate them.
What matters is, a group designed this and then was unable, in the context they'd set up, partly a technical and partly a social context, to save it from this attack from within. And attack from within is what matters. Communitree wasn't shut down by people trying to crash or syn-flood the server. It was shut down by people logging in and posting, which is what the system was designed to allow. The technological pattern of normal use and attack were identical at the machine level, so there was no way to specify technologically what should and shouldn't happen. Some of the users wanted the system to continue to exist and to provide a forum for discussion. And other of the users, the high school boys, either didn't care or were actively inimical. And the system provided no way for the former group to defend itself from the latter.
Now, this story has been written many times. It's actually frustrating to see how many times it's been written. You'd hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn't happen is other people don't read it.
The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is "learning from experience." But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That's not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: "Don't go in that swamp. There are alligators in there."
Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn't been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms' Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone's description of Communitree from 1978.
This pattern has happened over and over and over again. Someone built the system, they assumed certain user behaviors. The users came on and exhibited different behaviors. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled.
There's a great document called "LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction," which is about the wizards of LambdaMOO, Pavel Curtis's Xerox PARC experiment in building a MUD world. And one day the wizards of LambdaMOO announced "We've gotten this system up and running, and all these interesting social effects are happening. Henceforth we wizards will only be involved in technological issues. We're not going to get involved in any of that social stuff."
And then, I think about 18 months later -- I don't remember the exact gap of time -- they come back. The wizards come back, extremely cranky. And they say: "What we have learned from you whining users is that we can't do what we said we would do. We cannot separate the technological aspects from the social aspects of running a virtual world.
"So we're back, and we're taking wizardly fiat back, and we're going to do things to run the system. We are effectively setting ourselves up as a government, because this place needs a government, because without us, the place was falling apart."
People who work on social software are closer in spirit to economists and political scientists than they are to people making compilers. They both look like programming, but when you're dealing with groups of people as one of your run-time phenomena, that is an incredibly different practice. In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done.
And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.
Geoff Cohen has a great observation about this. He said "The likelihood that any unmoderated group will eventually get into a flame-war about whether or not to have a moderator approaches one as time increases." As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high...."
To continue reading the article please check out Clay Shirky's page.
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