It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Paul Snively picks up on "transparency". I agree with what he says, but I also think there are some things that need to be transparent in order to make infrastructure with them. Certain protocols, for example. I don't know about operating systems, but I think they are now so commodified that making their base workings clear is a good idea. I think Apple is moving in the right direction on this one (basing the OS on freebie Unix) while Microsoft is not (pushing out the frontiers of intellectual property enforcement, among other things). We'll see. [Doc Searls Weblog]
Thanks, Doc!
I think the follow-on observation is that we could be talking about transparency along multiple dimensions. To name just two of them, there's transparency of infrastructure implementation (e.g. operating system source code) and transparency of process (e.g. Enron's business dealings). Or maybe these aren't really two dimensions at all, but merely two levels of abstraction (i.e. Enron's business dealings are "infrastructure source code" to those dependent upon the infrastructure they traded in, i.e. nearly all of us).
In any event, when I referred to my previous post on reputation management technology, I should have said "start at the end," because it's only my last link that actually points to a real-world implementation. That's a better starting point than some of the more background-oriented and justification-based earlier links. Folks who are interested in the why's and wherefore's will get to them sooner or later anyway, while folks who just want to see how a reputation management framework might work can just download some Java and get to it.
But the common theme between our angles on the issue seems to be that commodities—whether energy or operating systems—should be increasingly transparent, to which I can only say, amen.
5:28:55 PM
As usual, Doc makes an excellent point. The question is how to achieve this transparency while protecting individual's privacy and valid, legitimate trade secrets. I suspect that the only pragmatic answer is to institute an aggregate trust metric: how much do other people trust the organization (and by the way, how trustworthy are these other people)? Of course, "aggregate trust metric" is just a fancy way of saying "reputation," and there are challenges in making reputation concrete rather than ambient as well as in ensuring that there's enough data in the system for the metrics to be statistically meaningful.
Despite these challenges, it needs doing, and I wrote about it—with links—in my previous post. Please take a look!
There's also probably some connection to be made to David Brin's The Transparent Society, too. And yes, I did just subversively send anyone who follows the above link through CritSuite. Heh.
11:17:47 AM
