What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

No sooner had we put the wrap on an April 9 Commonwealth Club panel interview on Collaborating for Change, than PBS announced a really cool collaborative project on Nova to design the "Car of the Future".   Both of these recent productions focus on the application of open source design to social and economic needs beyond software.  The promise of open source economics is popping up everywhere.  It must be something in the water, (or the atmosphere).   Network based open source design efforts have been written about before, and there's more than a few established non-software open source design projects, but they were hardly regarded as mainstream.  And open source as a business model has been a fringe enterprise.  But all that is changing.

The upcoming Nova special, and the Commonwealth Club interview (with Amy Novogratz, Kate Stohr, Maria Giudice, and myself (video courtesy fora.tv)) serve as proof points that this phenomena has exceeded meme status and is spilling over into the broader socioeconomic graph.   But we knew this was inevitable, right?  We just needed the right conditions for humanity's collaborative tendency to come out of the proprietary deep freeze.

The substrate upon which this new culture is rising pairs flexible licensing models a'la Creative Commons with accessible technology for building collaborative online communities a'la Drupal and Wordpress,  Yahoo!groups and PBWiki.  Among the catalysts for this reaction are frustration over obscene economic inequities around the world, abuses of people and planet for profit, and utter neglect by federal governments.  As was discussed here in the video interview about the Open Architecture Network, these frustrations can be overcome by collaborating for change on the net.

Need more proof of the trend toward an open source economy?  Just check with the folks at Open Everything.  They're tracking numerous open collaboratives, which are exogenous to  the software world, but infused with many of the same principles, practices and tools as open source software projects. 

One of the most prominent tools applied to these new collaboratives is Drupal, and we discuss it's role in the Open Architecture Network in the video (at :37:30, :46:30, and :51:00).

Ten years ago who would have imagined that:

• IBM would begin opening their patent portfolio?
• Major news bureaus would sponsor citizen journalism?
• Educational curriculum would be opened and shared for free?
• The Pirate party could get on a national election ballot?
• Sun Microsystems would convert its software portfolio to open source, and it would be profitable?  (Well, that one you might have imagined.)
  

Yet these, and plenty of other examples show that collaborative culture is on the rise.  Does this signal the next generation economy in which businesses profit less from market lockout and legal protection and more from direct value delivered in open markets?  Or does it lead to a more fundamental shift wherein socioeconomic prosperity derives less through commerce than through collaborations for which the primary incentive to contribute is sociocentric good? 

Start Up style enthusiasm was in no short supply at the second CommunityNext conference held at the Plug And Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale last Saturday.  Several companies represented were not even online as of the first CommunityNext conference held last February, yet many have since built thriving communities with millions of users.  The secret to their success, and the theme of this gathering, was viral marketing.

While February's day long event featured lessons on How to Tap The Wisdom of Crowds, Saturday's teachings might best be described as Getting Inside The Teenage Brain.  The scope of possibilities seemed to have devolved in the intervening six months to a level more concerned with how 14 year old girls will place a widget on their MySpace page than how the network effect can improve the lives of millions.  I left the event feeling like the social networking party had moved to the trailer park and the Anchor Steam on Draught had been supplanted by Pabst in cans.   But I don't spend much time on MySpace, so take my sentiments with a grain of salt (and a lime).

Amid the inanity of Profile Bling and Breakup Alert best practices there were sensible exchanges about building net communities the viral way.  Some insights from the viral front lines :

• Metrics matter - measuring effectiveness against goals are as important to running a widget based viral marketing campaign as any Madison Avenue ad campaign.  
  
• It turns out that wikis are for everyone - given a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich, teachers will use it to develop curriculum and engage their classes, as PBwiki discovered.
  
• The Facebook platform was deemed by many widget developers here as the API sine qua non.
  

Perhaps most relevant to a field architect like me was the implicit adoption pattern threaded throughout the presentations: widgets get combined with other widgets to make new and interesting platforms that are essentially loosely coupled composites of fine grained apps.  This seemingly chaotic trend toward Widget-dom foreshadows an adoption pattern that runs orthogonal to the SOA model so many enterprises are pursuing, where heavy duty governance is critical and service discovery with its attendant infrastructure represent costly overhead.  Corporations are spending millions planning multi-year SOA initiatives.  Meanwhile the Facebook platform allows developers to build composite applications quickly, all the governance is essentially embedded in the client libraries, and services are discovered virally - registries and WSDL are not critical to the ecology of a Widget World.  Granted, student social calendars and virtual food fights are a far cry from a CRM/ERP/BI mashup, and identity management and access control through a RockYou widget would make any CIO cringe, but with the addition of JSON support to platforms like Facebook I expect we'll see more complex integrations emerge soon, and WS-XACML shows promise for protecting data exchange between loosely coupled apps according to some rich policy.  How quickly will this hosted RESTful approach displace enterprise owned and operated SOA infrastructure is hard to predict.  No doubt the transformation is driven by many of the same factors driving the redshift market transformation Sun is betting on.

The explosive growth experienced by many of the companies at CommunityNext reaffirms Sun's focus on designing for network services at scale.  The results of that focus, such as Project Blackbox, the Niagra processor, and the Sun Grid, ought to figure heavily in the future of many of these start ups.  Sun's SOA technology, which looks more and more RESTful by the day, could be the best bridge for Enterprise IT to cross into Widget-dom, and a good platform for social networking platforms to adopt in order to penetrate the Enterprise market.

My cryptic and incomplete notes from this Sun sponsored event are below.

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The People Formerly Known As The Audience landed a piece on Wired.com today about the Open Architecture Network (OAN).  

The story was part of a pro-am journalistic experiment orchestrated through Assignment Zero that produced 80 distinct articles dealing with crowdsourcing, of which 12 earned a spot on Wired's home page.  As one of the OAN story contributors, I bagged my first byline on Wired.com, one in which I was decidedly on the am side of pro-am.  While my contribution was relatively small, it was enough to give me a taste of the post-edit blues - most of my copy was either red-lined, or reduced to the point of inaccuracy.   My original reporting expanded on the technology choices and process of developing a collaboration site using the open source CMS Drupal.   The final piece gives a nod to Drupal and Sun Microsystems, but leaves the wrong impression:

"Even the software powering the site -- designed by Sun Microsystems -- is open source: the Drupal content management system chosen by thousands of nonprofits for its ease of use."

Sun did not design Drupal, and while ease of use is one of the virtues of Drupal it's an oversimplified view of why so many nonprofits use it.  Granted, the focus of the story was not so much on technology as the potential for open source design, but one of the points red-lined from my copy was perhaps one of the most relevant given the context of this crowdsourcing experiment:

"Organizations that use Drupal for their online communities include... Assignment Zero."

Drupal is everywhere.   Drupal's integral role in the explosion of collaboratives born of open sharing and grass roots participation is worthy of an entire Wired issue, if not more than just a mention buried deep in one story.  Even among citizen journalism sites, it's a dominant software platform - witness The Witness Project, for example.

Still, good to see the momentum for Architecture for Humanity continuing in the media - in addition to the Wired piece, another story about the OAN appeared this week in Business Week, and AFH's founder, Cameron Sinclair, was added to the distinguished list of "Thinkers of Tech" for Fortune's iMeme conference next week in San Francisco.

We're still the audience, we just have something to say now. 

 

On Saturday February 10 I attended a great event on the Web 2.0 phenomena known as social networking (or should I say the social networking phenom known as Web 2.0?): CommunityNext at Stanford. Great speakers, good schwag, and a large dose of optimism about the potential for networks of people to affect enormous positive change in the world. See my notes from the event posted over on downstream.org.

Two orgs represented at the event I found especially compelling:
Kiva.org and Cambrian House.

Kiva.org has enabled the infusion of capital into the 80% of the world's population that is not banked through an innovative microfinance model that has gained much praise and attention from the media, philanthropists and financiers. My friend Tracey Pettengill, Founder of MicroPlace has partnered with Kiva's founder, Premal Shah, to bolster microfinance in Silicon Valley hosting a periodic event with the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network. Their next event features guest speaker Bob Annibale, Citigroup's Global Director of Microfinance. Should be an interesting discussion.

Cambrian House has an innovative model for incubating and propelling new business. Leveraging Crowdsourcing, the model facilitates those with a great idea for a product or service to connect with funders, technical expertise, legal support, guidance and moral support to get the idea off the ground. I'll let you know how my idea for the next big thing flourishes on Cambrian House.

If ever there was a group of entrepreneurs who are invested in the neutrality of the net's telecom infrastructure, it's the participants at this event. Perhaps better than any other business demographic, they demonstrate just how precious net neutrality is. No word on the next CommunityNext event, but I'll track it and post here.