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Re: Why the City of Vancouver website Cost $3 million

Dorian Taylor — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 19:23:09 -0000

If vancouver.ca exhibits a failure of anything, it's a failure of
rhetoric and/or political engineering, evidenced by the existence of
this debate. Whether it was worth the money remains to be seen and won't
be obvious for quite some time.

Investment in information infrastructure is biased toward value
generation rather than cost-cutting, at least from the point of view of
the entity investing in it. As for being a public resource, it very much
is about reducing everyday costs incurred by local residents. If it
saves a million three-dollar incursions over its lifetime, or a hundred
thousand $30 incursions, etc., it will be successful. Likewise, if it enables people to do things they couldn't previously have done, it will exhibit value there, and to date I'm still not sure how you calculate the ROI on that.

Re: The Things We Make and Do

Dorian Taylor — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:08:03 -0000

I nominated Kabuki because of the schmaltz, but polytheistic reconstructionism looks like another good candidate.

Please forgive me, I've been up to my eyeballs in cognitive/perception science, cybernetics and math literature for the last few months. It's starting to make me think funny things.

My favourite book on the subject of cognition and communication is Cognition in the Wild by Ed Hutchins, best read in conjunction with The Things that Make Us Smart by his buddy Don Norman.

Re: The Things We Make and Do

Dorian Taylor — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 13:47:29 -0000

Since most of the work involved in any of this stuff resides in our gaining comprehension, we can consider deliverables as both communicative interfaces to the client and receipts that we did something. The distinction reminds me of a remark Sterling made in his keynote at IDEA 2006: that which is interesting is not important and that which is important is not interesting. (NB: I'm inclined to splice "necessarily" into the appropriate spots of that little antimetabole.)

For instance, to perfect the technique I'm working on to perform automated content inventories, I produced a number of artifacts, including a web-scraping program and a glob of RDF data which it disgorged. Neither of those are interesting to anybody but me. But both are enormously important.

Ghetto-rig up another little script to turn the RDF into CSV files for consumption by a graph visualization app and massage for a bit and all of a sudden I find myself with something that is indeed interesting. Is it important? No. How can I tell? Because if I lost it I wouldn't be screwed; I could just whip up another one.

What is important about these interesting-but-not-important artifacts is that they be amenable to being understood, and therefore valued, by other people. I mean, really, we're in the business of cogitating hard problems and reconciling arbitrarily many considerations. Deliverables are just part of the Kabuki. And yes, well-defined processes will generate well-defined classes of artifacts, though I wonder if we should consider that incidental to the information we are trying to expose.

Anyway, I agree completely that focusing on the form of proximate deliverables belies the importance of their content, which is kind of ironic coming from a content strategist.

Re: Why You Should Focus on "Worst Practices"

Dorian Taylor — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:43:41 -0000

It says a lot about an organization if the chief executive consumes his/her own products. Conversely, the maxim of the drug dealer is "don't get high off your own supply".

Re: Is What's Good for Corporate America Still Good For America?

Dorian Taylor — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 10:43:12 -0000

Thanks, and please forgive me for latching onto only one side point. I find TARP (to which I assume you are referring specifically) to be an interesting event in this economic crisis. I perceive it to be a totem of a greater, deeper ailment.

If I recall correctly, Paulson tendered the TARP proposal as a two-page document that effectively read "give us $700 billion and don't ask us any more questions. We'll take care of it. Leave everything to us." It is that kind of information disparity that appears to have permitted the failure in the first place, from the hard selling of mortgages to people who were incapable of realizing they couldn't afford them, to exotic financial instruments that barely anybody understands.

For reasons much too verbose for a blog comment I see the entire economic debacle as the culmination of a boiling-frog problem, one of insufficient feedback that has stretched over a period of many decades. Why I suspect a broken or inconsistent narrative is because narrative is what places the rough constraints on our attention and focuses what we care about.

It sounds like what American taxpayers got in return for all that money was exactly relief from system-wide economic failure (although we should note that we can't actually confirm that because there is no control scenario to compare it to), and that's all. Raw deal. It would behoove them to figure out how such a system came to be so fragile.

I think, however, that this is where the fuel for optimism is buried. Self-actualization in individuals and small, ad-hoc groups has never been more affordable or arguably more necessary. This is not just in terms of gaining new competence and setting up new trade, but also dragging the activities of the incumbents into daylight. Enron is actually a great example of this. If I recall, their smoking gun was lying in plain sight for (I believe it was) McLean to find. That category of situation appears increasingly to be a contemporary reality.

This brings me to the part of the cultural narrative that I think needs changing: we don't need a towering intellect, an advanced academic designation or government security clearance to understand how our society works and how to influence it. We just need a modicum of interest to steer us in that direction, patience to gain comprehension and courage to carry it out.

Re: Is What's Good for Corporate America Still Good For America?

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:45:52 -0000

I think it's time to abandon the idea that organizations (i.e. their managers) are uniquely responsible for supplying the public with gainful employment. Creating jobs, routinely framed as "part of the deal", can only really be reasonably construed as an incidental side effect of the principals' desire for help to achieve their ends. If they don't need help, then guess what: no jobs. Job creation was never the responsibility of businesses and it is wholly unhelpful to cast it as such.

Now, the reason why I'm saying something as potentially unpopular as this is to jar us into the notion that it is up to us as individuals to find the means to sustain ourselves and prosper. That means taking stock of the useful things we can do and finding demand for them, then negotiating an agreement around them. It is also important to recognize that a job is only one archetype for a transaction of this kind, and a narrow one at that.

The longer we continue the narrative that these entities are the true delegates to whom we look for the means of occupying and sustaining ourselves, the more opportunities we (and ultimately they) will miss. They are clearly not up to the task.

Re: How to Create Useful FAQ Pages

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 23:03:13 -0000

Going over this again I'm seeing some room for misinterpretation. What I meant was that an individual, specific question that customers and users keep asking over and over, that is a bug in business process in communication. I'm not trying to suggest that FAQ pages are bugs, and yes they are analogous to the QWERTY keyboard in some ways.

Re: How to Create Useful FAQ Pages

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 15:46:24 -0000

I agree completely. A collection of FAQs all in one place is still a useful resource. I'm suggesting an additional consideration of where the content for the FAQs comes from, other ways it can be applied, who owns it and how to establish its life cycle.

(N.B. I also didn't suggest anything that wasn't readily achievable with existing technology.)

Re: How to Create Useful FAQ Pages

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:46:21 -0000

It would be nice if content was highly-addressable enough for FAQs to be placed where they are generated (e.g. a "what's this?" link, which would incidentally inform which questions were most popular). Have a concentration of FAQs as well but only as a secondary resource.

Although, I can't help but thinking however that an FAQ represents a failure to supply people preemptively with information. An FAQ is a question that has been asked so many times you've written the answer down and now direct people to it instead of telling them piecemeal. It's reasonable to do this, since customer support is expensive. But what would indicate a successfully-resolved FAQ (for one reason or other) is the fact that people don't ask it anymore.

Semantically, an FAQ is a lot like a bug. In fact it would almost make sense for the FAQs to be tracked in the same place as software bugs. FAQs represent bugs as well—bugs in business process and communication. Leveraging the infrastructure of a bug database would make a person accountable for every FAQ, such that it was accurate, relevant, and that an obvious answer had not yet been woven into the fabric of the system.

Re: The voice of reason vs. the voice of insanity

Dorian Taylor — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:15:49 -0000

Wasn't it Friedman that said "governments can't learn, only people can learn"?

Re: Why Economic Recovery Hinges on Values

Dorian Taylor — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:07:27 -0000

Ehlavaty,

Now I see what you mean. The solvent I use for the self-interest/altruism dichotomy is the notion of a generic interest in curing misfits. Both self-interest and altruism assume a certain amount of sophistication, whereas something like the urge to straighten a picture frame can be purely pathological. We can extrapolate this trait from even the most intricate of schemes to the most generous of disbursals.

Unsurprisingly I have trouble with the dichotomy of rhetoric and action as well. While we may not need rhetoric to act, we do need it to raise support, or just keep people from interfering, especially if the endeavour appears unorthodox to onlookers. I see Umair fitting in as an interpreter, at least presently, framing an accessible vocabulary for others to put into action.

(It is worth a footnote to indicate that in my professional experience creating artifacts of language that execute, I have reason to suspect that in the 21st century, talking is doing.)

⁂

Umair, I think the one place you could tune up your language is to gel the ideas of authentic value, awesomeness and betterness. I know they're meant to be accessible, and they seem to have been useful so far. I suspect, however, that they may be reaching the limits of their expressive power.

My own tendency is to shy away from words like authentic when speaking of value, as it assumes there is one absolute interpretation thereof. More to the point, it is a complete wash to those (i.e. the incumbents) who consider value to be a perceptual artifact. It doesn't say why it's better than SUVs and sugar water.

I think it would be much easier to get incumbent economic thinkers to concede that there exist goods, services and activities we can invest our attention into that substantively (as perceivable by onlookers) enrich us while others do no good, if not outright impoverish us. Likewise all the way up the supply chain. There are activities from which we benefit which necessarily take from others (e.g. sweat shops, conflict minerals, ecological disasters) while there are others that don't*.

(* At least perceptibly for the time being. One could argue that it is a natural law that order in one space necessitates chaos in another. The thing to recognize is that we will almost certainly uncover more considerations as we evolve, so it makes sense to build that into the system.)

Re: Why Economic Recovery Hinges on Values

Dorian Taylor — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:53:06 -0000

I didn't hear anything in Umair's message that could be unequivocally interpreted as an appeal for altruism. Rather I heard an urge to evaluate what we consider worth paying attention (and subsequently money) to.

Consider for instance that a non-profit organization is not necessarily a charity. Professional associations promote their members. Academic funds finance research. Think tanks attempt to frame political discourse. The altruistic nature of these kinds of entities is tangential at best.

At the same time there is no reason for operations similar to those to forgo a profit if one is to be had. These entities are simply artifacts of economic surplus. If there wasn't any, they couldn't exist. It's just that cash dividends aren't their first priority — their charters are. This could easily be mirrored in a for-profit entity, with one minor tweak. A healthy balance sheet need only be taken as an indication of popular support and a means of continuity, rather than a first-order objective.

The assumption of a dichotomy between self-interest and altruism has bothered me for some time. To sustain it is to give certain groups of people a little too much credit as highly competent rational actors, while at the same time condemning others as romantic ideologues. If this model wasn't suspect, there wouldn't be any academic interest in behavioural economics.

Ultimately the only resource we have is our attention. So-called altruistic endeavours sidestep the archetypal cash transaction and mobilize people for their sociopolitical ends. In a for-profit scenario this can be implemented as reinvesting the surplus to continue realizing more impressive products and services. Payment can be understood as a form of patronage.

Besides, we're almost at a point at which owning one of everybody else's manufactures is not as interesting as inventing our own.

Re: A Deeper Kind of Joblessness

Dorian Taylor — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:00:37 -0000

Umair, there's a subtle element I'd like to add to this analysis; you alluded to but didn't explicitly call it out. It's the notion of commerce as a sociopolitical activity (rather than living exclusively on the island of economics) and recasting a labour contract (i.e. a job) as a strict subset of commerce, rather than its own private atoll.

What I mean is that if I have the final piece of your neutron bomb and you have the final piece of my orbital death ray, we are probably not going to complete a trade because we can realize the greater effects of doing so. To project that onto your much less contrived example, I have only so much attention to spend on a Big Mac, and you have only so much to spend on burger-flippers. This situation yields a similar stalemate, though with apathy as the driver rather than fear.

This calls into question the idea of a job in general, the rhetoric of job creation, and whose job it is to create jobs. In my WMD stalemate above, we are unambiguously the principals in the trade. In many job scenarios, the principals shift around. Only in the smallest organizations do you see a chief executive who is also a principal shareholder, the person who hires you and to whom you report.

The person who allocates the job is going to be some executive who operates as an agent of a chief executive, who is an agent of the board of directors. The person you have to convince to allow you into an interview is likely an HR worker whose job it is ultimately to be convinced. Only then can you speak with the actual person you'd be working with if they decided to select you for the job. Of course, the person with whom you would sign an agreement and identify as your employer is fictitious: the organization itself. (Add trade unions to the equation for an extra degree of complexity.)

All this abstraction obfuscates what's really going on, which I suspect has left many people conceptually ill-equipped to deal with a recent shift in reality. The basic labour trade reduces to "Hey, I need your help with something. I'll compensate you for your time." There is nothing, however, precluding the inverse: "Hey, I see what you're doing there and I think it has value. I would like to help add value to it, I just can't do that for free." Job creation is an abstract and extremely narrow and rigid implementation of this idea, and only available to the few with massive capital under their control. This basic trade, however, is available to many more.

This brings me to patronage, which is the idea of using your resources to finance an activity because you believe it ought to continue. In some ways we can even cast the price system in this light. It is effectively to say "Continue doing whatever you are doing to deliver these goods at the lowest price." There are two places where this really matters: living on the margin and purchasing industrial quantities. We humans, however, are peskily contrast-sensitive, and as such we are content to employ an otherwise insignificant spread for political ends.

The evaporation of the archetype of the job is an opportunity for another, more egalitarian construct to replace it. For lack of a better term, I'll call it nanopreneurship. The idea is simple: those who want to realize some small change get together with those who want to see that change happen, and have the wherewithal to finance it. The return for the latter could be anything from interest to an equity stake to just having access to the result of the project. The project itself is a one-off, and if successful, everybody is better off both economically and socially. It is also important to demarcate this idea from charity, because what the patron is buying is the chance to enrich the world with (and gain personal access to) something that didn't previously exist.

PS, this is already happening, from PayPal tip jars to Kiva to KickStarter.

Re: Consume Create Ratio

Dorian Taylor — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:20:42 -0000

Some UBC people did a CA simulation recently that suggested max out at a 1:1 ratio of imitating (consuming information) to creating (synthesizing new forms).

While it is just a simulation, it's interesting to note that as the creators create more than they consume, the entire system supports fewer and fewer creators, and the overall fitness degrades, just as it would if not enough agents were creating at all.

Re: “Hand-Crafted Content” vs. the Machine: Betting on the People

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:25:53 -0000

Money quote: "Uh, you'll have to sit through the ad first."

I believe the Googobouros was mentioned elsewhere (Kedrosky?). So there has bloomed an entire parasitic ecosystem that capitalizes directly on an intellectual bait and switch.

If I understand the idea correctly, it is to identify by computer which content is likely to generate significant ad payouts, then crowdsource, Mechanical-Turk style, whatever content suffices. It is then published on an already shady domain-squatting infrastructure that has been accruing for over a decade for just such a purpose. The money is earned on the spread between the ad revenue and the payout to "authors".

So the result is, people are profligately polluting the Internet by selling ads for things (almost) nobody wants to buy against content nobody wants to read written by people barely motivated to write. I don't even need to put on my pointy Internet-Serious-Business Haruspex hat and julienne a hamster to tell you that this will end in tears.

On a somewhat creepier and slightly more specific note, if this really takes hold, it's kinda-sorta the beginning of the end of ad-supported content. Everywhere. Consider the following:

There is significant evidence to suggest that we're fragmenting our attention in a seriously unhealthy way in an effort to stay on top of things (Cf. Linda Stone). Attention is an inelastic resource—there is only so much of it per person and per (social) network. If the standard of ad-supported content reduces to that which unabashedly exists only to lure ad clicks—with concomitant quality—then that is quickly all that will be left.

What remains, then? Content minted for the purpose of being read for its own sake. How to monetize that? I don't know! But I'm happy to set on that problem for a modest fee.

Re: Steers, queers and peers

Dorian Taylor — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:46:10 -0000

I opened this post in my feed reader and was unexpectedly greeted by Kitty and Scales. Small world.

Re: Infographic Takes Apart the $819 billion Stimulus Package

Dorian Taylor — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 18:09:05 -0000

Whenever I see breakdowns like this I wince at the two-dimensional shapes used to represent one-dimensional values (the circles). Otherwise, I think that publishing daily preparations of data visualizations might stand a chance of being a business model that saves the newspaper brands.

Re: The 5 hidden costs of running a CMS

Dorian Taylor — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:01:12 -0000

Well-put, especially the point about commitment. That is something that goes beyond vendor lock-in. Any time you have to transmute information (and meta-information!), the associated costs are arbitrary and unpredictable.

Re: More people watching TV, Yes. Just not your shit.

Dorian Taylor — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 02:57:12 -0000

David,

Have you seen/heard any of Linda Stone's recent (as in years) talks on continuous partial attention? A salient point among many: "It's as if we expected our own attention bandwidth to grow with the ever increasing bandwidth of information". Something to be said for a medium with channel creep as a part of its nature.

Check it out when you have 20 minutes or so; it's at the top of http://ideaconference.org/b... . I think it really captures at the high level how contemporary business should be thinking about its customers.