Date: Thur, 31 August 2006 00:02:00 -0600
From: SuitWatch 
To: suitwatch@ssc.com
Subject: SuitWatch - August 31





                        SuitWatch -- August 31, 2006
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Turning the World I-side Out

   While huge progress has been made toward "user-centric" identity, I still
   have problems with "user-centric" anything.  The point-of-view is still
   outside the user.  It's still organizational, corporate.  If you're
   "centric" about users, where are you? Right, outside the user.  And inside
   something that's, well, not quite human.  Or worse, super-human.

   Think about it: Are you "user-centric"? Reminds me of a line in the movie
   "The Rose", in which Bette Midler, playing the title character, keeps saying
   "The Rose wants" this and "The Rose thinks" that.  The character Houston, a
   limo driver (played perfectly by Frederick Forrest) finding himself in bed
   with the The Rose, gets tired of hearing her self-centric vanities and says,
   "I think anyone who talks about themselves in third person is Looney Tunes."

   Identity is a first-person matter.  It comes from the inside, not the
   outside.  So does everything else we do as individuals.  Which is why I'm
   not just talking about identity this time.  I'm talking about everything
   that's missing in everything we've been doing ever since we first started
   calling computing "personal", way back in the late Seventies.  (Dick Cavett,
   voice of early Apple commercials, called the Apple II "the most personal
   computer".)

   Computing may be personal, but a lot of stuff that should be still isn't.

   Three examples:

    1. Identity
    2. Data
    3. Conferences

  First, identity.

   All the identities in our wallets and purses, from social security numbers
   to credit card numbers to library and museum memberships, are given to us by
   organizations.  More importantly, they represent "customer relationship
   management" (CRM) systems that at best respect a tiny fraction of who we are
   and what we might bring to a "relationship".  What CRM systems call a
   "relationship" is so confined, so minimal, so impoverished and so incomplete
   that it insults the word.

   No matter how "user-centric" we make our CRMs, the fact that we burden the
   vendor side with the entire relationship reveals how one-sided and lame the
   whole system really is.  Also how antique it is, in a time when individuals
   are only becoming more empowered by digital technology and networking.  It
   doesn't matter how respectful we make "federation" between CRMs of different
   companies.  The CRM system will remain broken until it appreciates, embraces
   and truly relates to customers -- not just as complex human beings, but as
   entities with many other relationships, and as potential sources of highly
   useful intelligence.  Not to mention money.

   Two years ago at Digital ID World, Drummond Reed (a prime author of the
   XRI/XDI standard that may some day underlie the DataWeb) said what we need
   is CoRM, for "Company Relationship Management".  On the latest Gillmor Gang
   http://gillmorgang.podshow.com , Mike Vizard called it "VRM", for Vendor
   Relationship Management.  Whatever we call it, we need to equip it on our
   side: the customer side, the citizen side, the member side.  "Vendor" may
   not be a broad enough label to include government agencies, public radio
   stations, museums and other noncommercial organizations, but it applies to
   the place to where we need it most: in the marketplace.

   VRM needs to do more than contain the virtual equivalent of credit and
   membership cards.  It needs to contain, or hook into, our transaction
   histories, our reputations, our preferences, our intentions.  I wrote a few
   months back about "The Intention Economy" that will grow from equipping
   sellers to meet customer demand after customer minds are made up -- a
   territory still sorely lacking in existence.  A key capability here, for the
   customer, is the willingness and the ability to remain anonymous -- and to
   do so selectively.  For example an individual should be able to reveal to
   the market that he or she has a good credit history, belongs to relevant
   membership clubs (such as those of airlines, public broadcasting stations
   and rental car agencies), and intends to do serious business -- for example,
   by expressing the intention to rent a certain brand and model of car in Salt
   Lake City for the week of January 7th -- without revealing his or her name.
    The system should support anonymity, in any level of detail, on the
   *customer's* terms.

   Far as I know, "user-centric identity" systems, good as they may be, still
   don't do this.  And as long as they don't, they will remain partial
   solutions to a much larger problem, and partial steps toward the last stage
   of the personal computing revolution.

  Second, data.

   Steve Gillmor, father and prime mover behind the Attention Trust and the
   Gesture Bank (and, more importantly, the prime advocate of individuals'
   rights to own and control their attention and gesture data, which are both
   currently accumulating in countless silo'd CRM systems, with near-zero
   accountability to the individuals being tracked), says both those efforts
   are actually about "user control, pure and simple".  He adds, "The user is
   in charge now.  History to come will proceed from that fact."

   What Steve looks toward is not a market that's built bottom-up.  Because
   there is no bottom.  There is no top.  It's not about vendor sports or who's
   biggest.  It's about the individual's ability to bring his or her unique
   values and choices to vendors who are ready to relate on equal and mutually
   beneficial terms.  Those terms include the individual's right to do what
   they want with their data.  Including data accumulating in the vendor's own
   databases.  Because user control of that data will be good for the vendor as
   well as the customer.

   If the perspective, and the movement in the marketplace, is not top-down or
   bottom-up, what is it?

   It's inside-out.  From the individual out to the marketplace.  The
   individual needs to be in charge of their independence, their freedom, their
   liberty, their assets, their choices, their relationships.  They will drive
   market growth in businesses that appreciate how much more can come from
   independent customers than from dependent ones.

   The tools Steve's working on in both Attention Trust and Gesture Bank are
   wrenches and screwdrivers in a toolbox that still hasn't been developed.
   Maybe his folks will develop that too.  I don't know.  But I do know we need
   it.

   Until then, we need to depend on, and support, vendors that respect the
   individual's ownership of data they produce -- especially if those vendors
   also understand that markets are built on maximized production ability by
   every participant in that market, including the human gullets we call
   "consumers".

   The best market example I know is digital photography.  I have close to
   eleven thousand pictures up on Flickr now.  From the start Flickr and I have
   both understood that those pictures are my data, and that the two of us are
   making the most of that fact.  Same goes for Tabblo*, a new company that
   does stuff with photos that Flickr doesn't.  Because Flickr has open APIs,
   and welcomes customers who also work with other vendors, I am able to make
   montages for printing and sharing, on Tabblo's site, with my Flickr
   photosets (See examples here:
   http://blog.tabblo.com/index.php/2006/08/23/we-heart-flickr/).  As a
   result, Flickr, Tabblo and I have all made money off each other, and enjoy
   productive symbiotic market relationships.

   Meanwhile, where is Kodak, owner of one of the world's largest patent
   portfolios and leader of the photography industry since the dawn of the
   category? You tell me.  Where I contribute to the market, their name never
   comes up.

   In the past we understood market growth largely in terms of "consumer
   choice" among silo'd competitors.  Virtual motto: May the best jail win.  In
   the future we'll understand market growth in terms of conversations and
   relationships -- because markets will increasingly reward companies, and
   customers, who make the most of both.  Virtual motto: May the best
   relationships win.

  3. Conferences

   After the latest Linux World Expo, I became more convinced than ever that
   The System is broken.  Cases in point:

     * Nokia loaned out Model 770 hand-helds for press people to try using on
       the show floor, where the show's wi-fi connections were completely
       useless to anybody.
     * While leading "Linux vendors" like Novell and IBM had large platoons of
       professionals on the floor, precious little actual help for actual
       customers was available.  As with every other standard same-old trade
       show, LinuxWorld is now mostly about sales and marketing.  Engineers,
       even if they were present, were under the thumbs of sales and marketing
       functions.
     * Serious geeks, who are still the heart and soul of Linux and the whole
       free software and open source movements, were at low ebb.  You could
       find them in the .org pavilion and walking around.  They weren't gone.
       But this used to be their show, and it isn't anymore.

   And LinuxWorld is hardly alone here.  We need trade shows that are put
   together by whole trades, and by leading practitioners of trades, rather
   than just by vendors who can afford to pay the big bux for the hotel and
   convention spaces.  Rather than just big players who run things.

   I'm not saying that there isn't still demand for booths and sales people and
   demonstrations and the rest of it.  I am saying that the system is hollow if
   it excludes the most original participants among the ranks of engineers,
   customers, engineers and thinkers like Steve Gillmor -- who contribute
   enormously to the market conversation yet don't fit neatly into any of the
   old categories (customer, vendor, analyst, editor).

   By the way, while I think the BarCamp movement is terrific
   http://barcamp.org/, I also think we need something else along the same
   lines that's completely new.  It would have low cost, no vendor control and
   many (if not all) of the elements Dave Winer outlines in "What is an
   unconference?
   http://scripting.wordpress.com/2006/03/05/what-is-an-unconference/" We
   have to do more than build markets again from the inside out.  We need to do
   the same with the relationships in every market category that depends on
   relationships between creators of stuff and the people who use that stuff.

   *Disclosure: I'm on the Tabblo advisory board.  It's a position I probably
   wouldn't hold if I wasn't a photographer who makes the most of Flickr.

     -- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with
     the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and
     a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard
     University.

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