Pierre's Web

Global Trust Exchange -- What for?

I ran across a link to the Global Trust Exchange (GTX) on Howard Rheingold's site in an old post. It caught my eye because I've been very interested in how trust works and evolves between people. It's an integral part of what makes eBay work, obviously. And it's critical for effective communities.

Now, granted, the GTX site is in its infancy, and a lot of details haven't been exposed or possibly even worked out. But I have to say that on the surface, this effort seems to be lacking in something very important: a reason for being.

Networks usually evolve around a particular purpose. They don't arise just because they're a good idea. Over the years, I've been particularly fond of pointing out that every town seems to have a Community Center, but people rarely seem to actually go there. The existence of a Community Center doesn't mean that the community is effective, or even what we would consider a "true" community.

Joi on Blogshares

Joi Ito writes an interesting thought piece on Blogshares, an online fantasy stock market for blogs.

Given my personal interest in markets and efficiencies, I've always been interested in these fantasy markets. Joi exposes the number one problem I have always had with them, however: it doesn't work like a real market if the value created and exchanged in the marketplace isn't "real" value.

"Real" value has to be transferable to other goods or services. The reason we don't still (for the most part) have a barter economy is that "money" is far more efficient. I'll trade you ten dollars for your bushel of apples, and then you'll take my ten dollars and trade them for a couple of magazines. You don't care that I also want to get rid of an old sack of potatoes, and you weren't about to trade your apples for my potatoes, since you weren't sure the guy at the magazine stand even liked potatoes.

With Blogshares, or generally any fantasy market, the value created isn't transferable outside the market, and therefore isn't useful.

But Joi brings up a really good idea. Take that value and make it transferable not in terms of wealth, but in terms of influence. Interestingly, in the real world, wealth and influence are sometimes linearly correlated also. I think this is a very promising direction to explore.

However, Joi is reluctant to fully endorse this idea because as he says, "voting shares is [market] oriented, but not really 'democratic.' It's about as democratic as wallstreet [sic] and the millionaires would control the blogs."

At the risk of evoking the response of "yeah, you would say that," I'll respond to Joi's concern by saying, "Yes, that's the way it's supposed to work."

Star Trek Ethics

Glenn Reynolds writes an article on a project by Rod Roddenberry, Gene's son, to document the impact of Star Trek's vision of the future on ordinary people.

He focuses on the fact that many Star Trek fans are attracted to the vision of the future that Gene Roddenberry initially thought of as "better." Not perfect, but better than they were then.

Star Trek shows us that it is possible to envision a world where people work together for peace, progress, and exploration. And the reason so many people find that vision attractive is that it is in fact already a part of our humanity. If it were so different or alien, would we even understand it?

A positive view of the future helps reinforce the positive that we have in our present.

Arabs Protest US Presence but Lack Strategy

In this analysis in the LA Times, writer David Lamb suggests that Arab governments haven't quite figured out how to react to the reality of the new Iraq situation. Besides agreeing on the principle that the US should withdraw its troops from Iraq, the Arab League doesn't even dare contemplate publicly a potentially better future for the Iraqi population.

And all avoid any mention of democracy.

Hala Mustafa, an analyst at the al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, said she was struck by Arab unwillingness to debate the "what next?" question, and their failure to offer creative responses to the the challenges presented by Sadaam Hussein's overthrow.

"Given the absence of democracy in the region," she said, "people since colonial times have accepted politics as a struggle against foreign powers and interventions. They are not taught anything except struggling against foreigners. So they're confused."

This is a missed opportunity, but unfortunately not surprising. Last year, the very same Arab League prepared a report for the United Nations Development Program outlining the challenges faced by the Arab world, and specifically its own 22 member nations.

The most striking problem the report cites is a lack of democracy, which leads to poor governance. Only when citizens are actively engaged as part of their society can good governance emerge. According to the report, Arab governments' attitudes towards civil societies ranged from outright opposition to "freedom under surveillance."

This type of centrally controlled, fundamentally dis-empowering society, will inevitably lead to a brittle system; one that cannot adapt to new realities, or unexpected shocks. Shocks like the removal by force of an Arab dictator, and the liberation of 20 million people who have been oppressed for decades.

Should the Arab League be the proper forum for a discussion on the future of Iraq? Should Arab citizens be more open to the possibility that there might be a positive outcome from the US campaign to overthrown Sadaam Hussein?

Journalist forced to suspend weblog

Denis Horgan, a member of the Hartford Courant's staff, was forced by its editor to cease operating his weblog.

This is an interesting example of the tension between an individual's personal beliefs, and those of the company with which he chooses to associate himself professionally.

Should a company have the right to restrict an employee's activities outside of work on the grounds of conflict of interest?

Esther Dyson's blog

Esther Dyson has a new blog. Makes me feel better, like I'm not the last person to just be getting started with a blog.

She's in a tough spot because, as she says: "a lot of what I do is stuff I simply can't write about: internal meetings with portfolio companies, corporate regime change, private briefings and such." It will be interesting to see how she balances that.

Nonetheless, congratulations on taking the plunge!

Back to the Mac

Well, I made the switch. I'm now using a Mac. A PowerBook G4. It's pretty sweet, and it's great to be back.

I used to be a Mac guy -- I bought the original Macintosh 128K in 1984, for $2,500. And I used Macs up until 1995. But by then the Mac OS was running behind Windows in terms of new Internet technologies, and I had to switch for professional reasons. I never learned to love Windows. It's ugly, unstable, messy, and generally unpleasing. But I was stuck.

A little over a year ago, I switched away from Windows to FreeBSD. Using the KDE desktop, Sun's StarOffice or OpenOffice.org, it was a great workstation. I prefer FreeBSD to the various linux distributions -- it seems more stable and user-friendly in terms of installation and configuration of third-party packages, throught the FreeBSD Ports system.

I also enjoyed the tinkering aspect of BSD Unix. So when I learned about Mac OS X, I started to think about it. And I made the plunge yesterday.

So far, so good.

The kindness of New Yorkers

From megnut.com, without comment: The kindness of New Yorkers - megnut.com

Last night as I exited the subway, I stopped at the booth to have more money put on my MetroCard. As my transaction was being processed, a train pulled in. Several people began exiting through the turnstiles, while at the same time a woman came rushing into the station, mumbled about being in a hurry and missing the train, and got on line behind me. Just then, a woman exiting called out,

"Hey lady! Lady!"

We both turned.

"I just swiped my card so you could go through. Hurry! Don't miss your train!"

And with that, one woman dashed through the turnstile, calling out her thanks, and onto the uptown train. The other headed off into the evening. And I walked the whole way home with a smile, my mood brightened by what I'd witnessed.

Social Capital and Community Governance

An old (from 2001) working paper by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis of the Santa Fe Institute caught my eye. The abstract from Social Capital and Community Governance:

Social capital generally refers to trust, concern for one's associates, a willingness to live by the norms of one's community, and to punish those who do not.

While essential to good governance, these behaviors and dispositions appear to conflict with the fundamental behavioral assumptions of economics whose archetypal individual--"Homo economicus"--is entirely self-regarding.

We regard these behaviors and dispositions as aspects of what we term community governance. We suggest that

1. community governance addresses some common market and state failures but typically relies on insider-outsider distinctions that may be morally repugnant;
   
2. the individual motivations supporting community governance are not captured by either the conventional self-interested preferences of "Homo economicus" or by unconditional altruism towards one's fellow community members;
   
3. well-designed institutions make communities, markets, and states complements, not substitutes;
   
4. with poorly designed institutions, markets and states can crowd out community governance;
   
5. some distributions of property rights are better than others at fostering community governance and assuring complementarity among communities, states, and markets; and
   
6. far from representing holdovers from a premodern era, the small-scale local interactions that characterize communities are likely to increase in importance as the economic problems that community governance handles relatively well become more important.
   

The most interesting (and not too surprising) points for me are that:

1. Well-designed institutions can enhance community governance, or community effectiveness; and
2. Poorly-designed institutions can really make things difficult.

China says SARS is 10 times worse than admitted

From the Guardian: China says Sars outbreak is 10 times worse than admitted

The behavior of Chinese officials in trying to cover up the extent of the outbreak is confusing. By understating the number of cases tenfold, they make it seem like the problem is much worse than they are willing to admit. But a tenfold increase in number of cases from 37 to 339, out of a country of billions of people, is still incredibly insignificant.

They should have just owned up to the outbreak earlier, and avoided creating this perception that China is overrun with cases.