Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
I’ve doing several interviews this week. In a couple of hours I’m interviewing Patri Friedman about Seasteading. Then, tomorrow I’ll be talking to Jim Bessen of Patent Failure fame, and the president of the Encyclopedia Britannica. What should I ask them?
My last post on the ISO standards body vote in favor of OOXML sparked a few comments, so here goes another. While the headlines of Groklaw generally tell only one side of the story, here’s an interesting blog post from Jan van den Beld, the former Secretary General of Ecma International, the standards body that first approved OOXML as a standard.
If you’re like me and think that standards bodies will play an increasingly important role in the future, you want to see a process with integrity, accountability and transparency.
In his post, Jan van den Beld says that groups opposed to ratification are now trying to blame the messenger (standards bodies), in addition to the message (the standard):
They have resorted to making accusations of impropriety on the part of national standards bodies where they were unhappy that their negative views on this issue didn’t carry the day – notably on blogs such as noooxml.org and Groklaw. They would have you believe that no one could possibly favor ratification without being bribed or manipulated. Indeed, it appears that they find it impossible to believe that anyone could possibly disagree with their views, despite the overwhelming number who do in fact disagree with this position. These direct attacks on the integrity or national standards bodies are without merit.
Ars has posted my review of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, which is coupled with an interview I conducted with him a couple of weeks ago. Shirky’s a fount of interesting ideas. One of the central ideas in Here Comes Everybody is the concept of a Coasean floor:
Coase is the economist who asked and answered one of the most famous questions in all of economics: if markets are such a good idea, why have firms at all? Why do we have these sort of institutional and organizational frameworks? Why can’t you just have everybody offer their services to everybody all the time, and have markets and contracts put it all together? And his answer was that there’s a huge transaction cost in simply finding who’s available, what they offer, making some kind of deal. And so what firms do, in Coase’s answer, is they lower transactions costs for group effort. And that gives them an economic advantage over markets in certain situations.
Everybody has understood since that article was published in the mid-1930s that there’s a Coasean ceiling: a point past which, if a firm grows too large, it just breaks down. And we’ve seen this with giant conglomerates, whether it was ITT in the 1970s or InterActiveCorp today. The question is: when is it too big?
What we all missed, because it was never really an open question until now, is that there’s also a Coasean floor. Which is to say, there’s a set of group activities that would create some value but it isn’t worth forming an institution to create.
Read on to learn how the collapse of the Coasean floor affects abusive priests, Microsoft and Novell, Wikipedia, and businesses trying to make money in a changed technological landscape.
Monday’s news indicating that ECMA’s Office Open XML (OOXML) standard will be approved has some people crying foul about the whole thing.
In case you haven’t been following things, OOXML is a document format up for approval before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It’s been a wild and politicized process for what one would think would be a relatively objective task of evaluating a technical standard.
OOXML was developed by Microsoft, so obviously Microsoft has been pushing for its approval. Companies like IBM and Sun, which developed ODF, an existing document format standard, have been lobbying against approval.
Nothing new under the sun, as my colleague Morgan Reed writes on the ACT blog. IBM’s been lobbying for state procurement preferences for ODF for the past few years:
Luis Villa has an interesting write-up of his week at the Microsoft Tech Summit. The explicit goal of the summit, apparently, was to bring together the two major worldviews in the software development world: the “cathedral” model, represented by Microsoft’s own top-down software development process, and the “bazaar” model of the typical open source/web 2.0 project. I’m not sure what Microsoft was hoping to get out of this, but I can think of a couple of likely answers: to soften up the antagonism toward Microsoft in some corners of the open source world, and to keep their own people on their toes by learning more about the types of criticisms they’re likely to encounter on the other side of the fence.
This is something that Microsoft, to its credit, has put an impressive amount of effort into. Way back when I was in college, almost a decade ago now, Microsoft hired a friend of mine to be Microsoft’s official campus evangelist. Basically he got paid $15/hour to hold meetings where he’d tout (and in some cases give away) Microsoft products. They were totally up front about it, and I think it was pretty effective. Lots of us still disliked Microsoft’s products for various reasons, but it definitely took the edge off of anti-Microsoft attitudes. More recently, Microsoft hired prominent blogger Robert Scoble (who has since left to help evangelize Microsoft’s products. This sort of thing has helped to counteract the negative publicity the company has gotten from its more open-source-hostile actions.
I also think it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that the software industry is virtually unique in even having these kinds of distinct, well-defined ideological camps. Maybe I just don’t know other industries well enough, but I can’t think of any other examples. The philosophical distinctions here are totally orthogonal to conventional ideological categories. Yet they attract similar levels of fervor from their adherents as do liberalism, conservatism, or libertarianism. Geeks like to half-jokingly refer to these kinds of disagreements as religious difference, and they really are only half joking. Questions about software licenses and project organization do, in fact, inspire exactly the same kind of passion as debates over theology.
Over at Techdirt (and here on TLF), Tim Lee takes issue with my post suggesting that Wikipedia should consider selling ads instead of asking for donations. He has a good point, which is that right now the only reason to volunteer to work for Wikipedia is because you’re passionate about it, but that might change if money became involved. But I think Tim overstates his case:
Being a member of the Wikipedia board would no longer be a thankless exercise in public service, but would be a relatively glamorous opportunity to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars to one’s pet causes. Over time, the senior leadership positions would be sought out by people who are more excited about doling out largesse than editing an encyclopedia.
I’m not sure why that would be the case. By that rationale we could never have large philanthropic foundations because they would attract self-interested directors. As long as their actions are transparent and they are accountable to the wikipedians, I don’t see why the money couldn’t be directed for the benefit of Wikipedia. And if the directors enjoy some vicarious “glamour” as a result, then I think that’s a fine reward for hard work—it might even attract better candidates than are interested today.
Since it’s Sunshine Week I’ll stress that the key is transparency. And Tim is right on this point, too: institutions matter. Right now Jimmy Wales is taking some heat for conducting his Wikipedia business in a less than transparent manner. If that’s how Wkipedia is going to operate, them perhaps money will corrupt it and Tim is right that “there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars.” Still, I guess I’m just more optimistic about what the Wikipedia community is capable of.
P.S. Yeah, I love Twitter! Check me out at twitter.com/jerrybrito.
Over at Techdirt, I disagree with Jerry’s point (and Mike Linksvayer’s) about the concept of ad-supported Wikipedia. While the organization could certainly do some worthwhile things with the money, I think there’s a significant danger that fighting over the money could begin to overshadow the Wikimedia Foundation’s important mission of ensuring the integrity of the Wikipedia editing process itself.
Superficially, this might seem at odds with libertarians’ general inclination to view profit-making as a benign phenomenon. But I think the essential point here is actually one that libertarians make a lot: money generally matters less than institutions. Increased spending—on schools, narcotics control, wars, whatever—will only have beneficial effects if the underlying institutional framework is designed to use that money effectively. If your institutions aren’t designed to utilize resources effectively—if, say, you’ve got a bureaucratic monopoly school system or a hopelessly confused military strategy—then injecting additional resources into those institutions isn’t going to produce any positive results. Those additional resources will simply be dissipated into pointless rent-seeking.
There’s nothing dysfunctional about Wikipedia, viewed as an institution for editing an encyclopedia. But there’s no reason to think an institution built to edit an encyclopedia is going to have any special competence to oversee the spending of millions of dollars of free money. And given that arguments about money could easily distract and divide the already-fractious Wikipedia community, I think it’s probably smart to avoid that quagmire entirely.
I don’t think I’m currently in a position to apply for it, but this sounds really interesting:
Our platform team is responsible for the core software technologies that cut across all of our products and power the site. Internships are available for talented software engineers who are proficient in PHP, C++ or Java, and have experience and interest in working in LAMP environments.
What change or new feature that could be completed as a 3 month project with a small team of fellow interns would you undertake to improve NYTimes.com?
Please submit your resume and a brief response (200 words or less) to the question above to nytimes2008internship@gmail.com.
I’ve been known to beat up on “old media” outlets and their tendency to resist technological change, but I’ve actually been pretty impressed of late by the nimbleness of the largest newspapers. The Post has long been a leader in the use of the web, and lately the New York Times and (to a lesser extent) the Wall Street Journal have also shown increasing web savvy.
One example is Open, a blog that discusses the use of open source technologies at the Times. It’s a sporadically-updated blog that gives a glimpse at the technology underlying one of the world’s most prominent media platforms.
Glen Whitman has a great post on the relationship between modularity and innovation. He’s exactly right that modularity (or what software types would call open standards) promotes progress by allowing people to build software from pre-existing components without worrying about exactly what’s inside any given component. One of the most important examples of modularity in the computer industry is the Internet’s end-to-end principle, which allows application developers to ignore the details of how to get packets from A to B, and instead focus on what to do with packets once they reach their destination.
Via the always carefully inoffensive ValleyWag, Psychology Today has a post about a study of the motivations of open source programmers and other participants in collaborative online projects. The study finds that “software contributors placed a greater emphasis on reputation-gaining and self-development motivations, compared with content contributors, who placed a greater emphasis on altruistic motives.”
We’ve discussed here before how open source projects often represent a more efficient way of producing information goods than firms. Some are eager to class open source as “non-market” (read altruistic) behavior, but I think it’s better considered as market behavior that happens to trade in human capital, reputation, self-satisfaction, etc. rather than money.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
