Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

I attended the San Diego Regional Workbench Consortium this morning, lead by Keith Pezzoli from UCSD. This was an interesting mix of local planners, environmental activists, industry, students, and folks from the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Scripps Institute of Oceanography. The topic of the meetin was formally Solid Terrain Mapping, which produces three dimensional maps from digital elevation model data and digital images. The informal network of people talking before and after was most interesting to me.

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Business Week Online, Linux Uprising tells of the amazing story of how an open source software effort has changed the computer industry. A Microsoft executive in his retirement letter warns “Microsoft is in danger of being swept away by open source.” How can this happen? What is the energy driving this revolution?

My friend Mark Watson (I took that picture of him and his wife at the Taj Majal) effused on his blog,

“Why is the Internet so COOL? One reason is that people help each other. I try to spend about 30 minutes a week answering peoples questions on my favorite Usenet news groups. Today someone helped me! I needed to do an SQL query against a database that I just created with information on board of directors for a sampling of US companies. I am a little rusty on my SQL and was having problems. So, I posted to comp.databases a question and within a few minutes Bob Badour (who I do not know) was kind enough to help me out.”

Mark is not a newbie to the Internet. He has been publishing software since the Apple II in the late 1970′s, and written 13 technical books.

But something has changed. We are seeing the emergence of a gift economy, and we have reached a global critical mass within which an entirely new way of thinking is emerging. Two weeks ago, John Graham suggested the notion of using the Aha! as a reputation mechanism. A week ago, I posted a note on Zope.org describing our effort. And yesterday I got a message from Zope Guru Kapil Thangavelu offering to help out with the project. It turns out he has an open source package for rating which looks like it might be a foundation for doing the Aha! rating. This is an amazing sequence of events, and driven by people working out of a sense of generosity, collaboration, and cooperation. These energies are autocatalytic. The more we see them evidenced, the more incentive there will be for others to act the same way.

Can we channel this kind of energy and connectivity in other ways? Can people work together for humanitarian development, education, health, environmental issues, peace, and many other pressing problems of our times? Can we apply this energy in autocatalytic ways in which everyone is uplifted, and in so doing, uplifts everyone else?

I think so. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, thinks so, too. In Business Week Online he said:

“That’s when it hit me: You know what, people really get a good feeling themselves when they can give praise to people who deserve. That is more powerful than the need to complain about somebody. It was a wonderful revelation.”

All we need to do is give people the chance to connect at their positive core values. We’ve shown that it works in open source software, now we need to make it work in a cascade of uplift for humanity as a whole.

Stay tuned…

A Pattern Language for Living Communication by Doug Schuler is a good introduction to the notion of Pattern Language thinking to social issues.

I have used Christopher Alexander’s pattern language ideas in designing my own home’s landscaping. Faced with 2 acres of empty land, it was a wonderful exercise to divide it into zones with an interconnecting language of forms, textures, public/private, paths, building materials, and so forth. Artist/Visionary/Architect James Hubbell was a wonderful colleague in this effort. It was amazing to me how a language emerged during the design process.

There is much more to pattern languages than meets the eye. In particular, Alexander’s notion of patterns are specifically based on the notion of a problem.

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In an article in NATURE| VOL 421, 20 FEBRUARY 2003, p. 799 P. Kirk Visscher writes:

“Self-organized systems can evolve by small parameter shifts that produce
large changes in outcome. Concepts from mathematical ecology show
how the way swarming bees dance helps to achieve unanimous decisions.”

Interesting lessons about the difference in the waggle-dance of bees as they are searching for nectar and searching for a new hive location. The nectar foragers increase the diversity of their dancing, while the nest-site scouts decrease and eventually select a single site. The nest-site graph looks suspiciously like a power law distribution, which leads me to wonder if this can be explained as cascade phenonenon.

John Graham came up with a neat idea in our GivingSpace conference call this morning for rating objects called the Aha!. Similar in some ways to Friendly Favor’s ThankYou complementary currency, the Aha! would be given by someone who wishes to recognize a person, idea, or other object that has given them an Aha! experience. Objects which collect a lot of Aha!s would bubble up to the top of various listings, allowing future people to find the sites which have been most enlightening to other people.

This could be used in many different contexts, such as allowing Appreciative Inquiry groups to rate the questions they use for their inquiries. A database of questions could be established, and their effectiveness could be rated as people explored the question and its effect. As questions evolved over time, people could see how an original question got started, and then was changed to meet different contexts… part of an evolutionary attribution thinking of Douglas Engelbart

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The Omidyar Foundation has awarded GivingSpace a grant to test “of whether intra- and extra-community network dynamics can be enhanced by the creation of an Internet-based system for collaboration, complementary currency, and focus on areas of “uplift” as opposed to more typical media-driven discourse of problems and emergencies. At the completion of the project, The Foundation will have a living example of network dynamics and Inform, Inspire, and Engage through a technical foundation. The source code will be released under an open-source license for others to build on.”
The foundation is funded by Pam Omidyar and her husband Pierre Omidyar , founder/Chair of eBay.

This award marks a milestone in the 2 year evolution of GivingSpace. We have been holding discussions and meetings; now we are developing a prototype to demonstrate the concepts we have been talking about. Perhaps the most poignant moment in these discussions came at our meeting at the Benton Foundation. Noting that we were mostly white, northern males sitting around a table in Washington, I was delighted that Usha Jha, Program Director from the Nepalese Women’s Empowerment Program could attend. I asked her, “What could GivingSpace do for the women in the villages of Nepal?” She responded immediately, “Give them the opportunity to tell their stories of empowerment.” In other words, they wanted to give, and their stories were their gift.

This also marks a shift in our discussion from “giving” to “uplift.” There are several reasons for this. Although gifts can be uplifting, they are certainly not the only form of uplift. Beginning the discussion with a concept of gift triggers the “Santa Claus” effect: it starts a rich donor/poor recipient one-way model of interaction from which it is difficult to escape. The notions of trust, mutuality, reciprocity, self-reliance, self-organization, and community span much more than just philanthropy. Rather than continue the “stovepipe” model of thinking, the Uplift metaphor allows us to rationally talk about health, social, economic, cultural, and philanthropic activities. More information about the project is located at http://www.givingspace.org/uplift.

There were many people who helped make this happen. Jan Hauser in particular was instrumental in bringing together the ideas and the connections to make this work.

The first design workshop of the effort was held at Stanford University on February 6, 2003. Toshio Yamagishi’s presentation on Reputation Systems was very well received. The next meeting will be March 6 at Stanford University.