Persona Prime

So I was talking the other day to Mark Hindsbo, the GM of Evangelists at Microsoft. He was basically wanted to talk about healing rifts with the OpenSource community. I was a bit blunt and brutal (but in a gentle way )

I said it is impossible for the OSS or FOSS communities to ever believe MS. I said the OSS shouldn’t and that MS should quit trying. The MS business model is broken in regards to OSS. The only way to change that trust is to change the business model.

The way to do that is focus on services. But maybe not services the way the FOSS community does…

I said if MS wants redemption it should look to the clouds…

hehehe or “the cloud.” One thing MS has always respected is the automony of its business clients and developers. I mean that is the point for such products as Small Business Server. Business clients are responsible for their own data and can act autonomously. This is NOT a stretch for people to believe in when it comes to MS’s reputation.

With the cloud’s current state, Data/autonomy is being taken away from people and businesses. Years ago I registered the URL WeTheUsers.org/com when I realized this was happening.  Though understand,  I have a gmail address. I am as guilty as the rest. But, at least I understand the tradeoff of convenience to secrecy.

So what can MS do? instead of Open Source… they should give people back their data. On MS cloud, Azure, they should do it right. Charge for services. Encrypt the data so the Feds can’t raid MS to get YOUR company/ind data.

and here is the BIGGIE

Be TRANSPARENT!

Let people SEE the data can be gathered and decide if they want to SELL it back to you for “free” services. This will KILL google. When people realize the scary psychometric data being gathered and presented back to them ESP companies… I think they will find it worth while to pay for services.

I mean most companies don’t even realize that they void NDAs when using gmail addresses. Make that transparent to them. Create accountability.
This isn’t just about security… it is about another form of transparency and that is about data.

People as a whole don’t care about code… they care about themselves and their data is a reflection of that.

yea… sometimes I’m evil. But they loved me at the Microsoft VIP party at SXSW.

At the very least we will be able to check the anonymizing functions the data is being put through… and make up our own minds as to what monolith to support.

Personally this gal with a libertarian bent likes it better when the monoliths are fighting it out.

Wow how to limit it to one…

The very first that springs to mind is my past mentor, Ellen Guon Beeman. She taught me everything I know in regards to project management. She’s the only gal I know that can consistently bring in complex gaming projects in on time and on budget.  She wrangles cats like no one else.

But somehow that didn’t seem techie enough… So second to mind is Limor Fried, adafruit.com, but that is because she is also known as “ladyada” and we met when I was dressed as the famous picture of Lady Ada As a steampunk party at SXSW.  Limor is also a faboo technologist and as a Open Source Hardware designer and manufacturer also qualifies as a serious geek!  but many are going to profile her…

So then I thought of circuit girl, Jeri Ellsworth ,who is doing some amazing projects with the Fatman ( a long time friend of mine.) But don’t know her as well and hasn’t had a huge impact on my life though her program is fun and she does many nifty things.

So I thought harder… I wanted something more fundamental.  Then I realized the woman that has influenced me the most in this arena by far is my mom, Dr Lynda Bonewald. She is a true scientist in every sense of the world. I often get so lost in my technological niches that I forget the basics. My mother taught me good science long before I knew who Feynman was. And her integrity is an amazing example to women everywhere.

Moms aren’t always shiny to us and often can be taken for granted… But I will never forget when I was 6yrs old and hanging out in her lab at Scripps in San Diego and she placed 6 test tubes filled w mysterious substances and had me figure out what they might be w my little notebook and a barrage of tests.  I learned the scientific process at a very early age.  Thanks for believing I would understand at such a young age and teaching me Mom.  Most parents wouldn’t give that much that early but you did and I forever am grateful for how much you challenged me.  Challenge in the true scientific meaning as in looking for possible truths and testing them (not a negative thing as others might see it.)

I love you Mom and thanks for making me into the geek that I am today even if I am no longer a traditional scientist I still use those most basic scientific tools you gave that little 6 yr old!

or how to write a one pager.

I have been pondering this concept for the past 5 yrs.  LoTV did a survey of legislators on 2004 and the top features they wanted was 1) a rss feed of all commentary on their legislation 2) one pagers from organizations and 3) the demographic data behind those one pagers.

They were not interested in the pure voter opinion demographic data.  That surprised me as I had assumed the thing that would be forefront in their minds was getting elected and being representative of their people.  That was not true of the elected officials.  Instead they were more interested in tools that would help them become statesmen again.  They want to facilitate win/win solutions between divergent groups of people.

This makes sense if you think about it… after all who wants to be a pure voting tool?  This could eventually can be done by computer (I argue could be done today if people cared.)  Instead they brought up an important point.  They want to be like Solomon and help people as well as being a good leaders.

This in the larger sense is comforting to me. When I created the survey I was very focused on feature set not an agenda.  The fact that this evolved out the discussions in an indicator of something more ingrained to their personality types.

So to help with Number 1 requested feature, I came up with the idea of creating permalinks on a paragraph by paragraph basis.  I will outline this in another post esp when the video presentation from SXSW as done by my Design intern Adrian Parsons is posted.  I call it making Government Web Citable!

This post is about the #2 and #3 requested features.  The one pagers and the demographic data behind those groups.  I created the concept of the C-wiki or consensus or common ground wiki.

It is a wiki with special tools so that it could mimic Robert’s rules of order.  The difference is people could not just vote but also rate their levels of satisfaction.  This way we could not only have a whitepaper but the demographic data.

1. Why certain decisions were made in the comments
2. % of satisfaction in the voting nubmers
3. Demographic data that participants choose to share

You could even target the tool towards Consensus of 80% satisfaction for close knit groups or 50% when you are simply looking for common group w diverse groups.

Hunter Ellinger has done different demos both in Drupal and Rails.  But I think truly we may need to look further than this.  I am instead looking at taking this open source code and providing a hosting service model that would be a revenue stream.

Some features I think would be necessary to make this work are

1. Facilitator tools both virtual and RL
2. Real life documentation features
3. Basic Process templates with ability to vary percentages of satisfaction
4. Ability to create your own process template
5. Ability to give others your vote
6. Ability to more heavily weight others votes like Board of directors (transparently of course)
7. Mesh Real life (RL) voting with other virtual participants

I can imagine having RL fishbowl style meetings with virtual participants.  Imagine the board of directors getting together in RL and broadcasting this to the membership and allowing the membership to also participate virtually.  If the numbers are too large, the virtual membership with similar goals can pool resources to gain visibility.  Perhaps they can elect their own representatives or just vote up a concept they like regardless of the person.

We could create one pagers from these and have all the background discussion and demographics documented.  This would be some phenomenal information in regards to decision making.  Of course we will fine tune the toolset with transparent algorithms.  I think unlike DIGG and other groups.  The group of people themselves owns their own data (hence this being a paid service.)  So they would be responsible for creating balance themselves in a transparent fashion.  That is the beauty of this solution.  Unlike other sites everyone participating here honestly want to know the general consensus.

I think the first and most simple Template we would create of this is a

Robert’s Rule of Order Wiki

and to target NPO (NonProfit Organizations) creating their Bylaws and other such documentation.

saw a post today about how CMS’s are evil…

As to disliking the CMS and advising NPO’s and other to create their own…  I’m sorry I disagree.  They need it simple.  And simple means not creating something new.  (version, scope control etc etc)

Instead for my NPO’s (I’m on the board of directors of tano.org Texas Assoc of Nonprofit Orgs),  I recommend the cloud.  Yes, even as I protest the cloud’s use of users data and lack of protection.  It is a huge win for NPO’s to go with someone else hosting solution and setting up wordpress.  Their IT infrastructure is always lacking and it is simplier to outsource it all in a central location that does backups properly.  Most NPO’s know next to nothing in regards to properly hiring and managing an outside consulting firm for custom development.  And to be honest, can’t afford them.

The simpler the better and as a point of disclosure… I used to have a group called Assistorg.org where we did drupal setups for NPO’s.   The educational process was huge.

at the same time I also got wind of a new structure of RDF and RSS feeds being required by the federal government to states receiving the stimulus package.

Now the hard thing about this post is I really like both of these guys.  And I think they are really good developers.

But

I do believe they are both going in the wrong direction.

In the data realm, I would like just to have access to the DB dumps.  Seriously, the govt needs to just scrub them of privacy data and put them in a data warehouse.  And then make that available w open API.  We will create our own RSS feeds and process it ourselves.  Requiring standards at that level always makes me nervous because of the resistance to changing them once set.  And you never know what data you are also going to want later.  I prefer those standards evolving organically – after we see what interesting programs others make.

i would like to see thinking moving in a more semantic direction.