As I pointed out on another related blog: Colin Henderson from ‘Bankwatch’ states: “The complexities with VRM related to the various possibilities make the size of VRM almost impossible to imagine.”

RSS does not have the same DNA, as the increasingly complex plans for VRM… and with the greatest respect, its easy to talk of VRM’s characteristics as if they are empirical, but there clearly is a lot more ‘belief’ than ‘knowledge’ flying around.

[damn, why am I coming across as such a kill-joy? I support the basic ideas. I support all the same ideals, I admire the progenitors; I am just having trouble with all the rhetoric...]

“We need the invention that mothers the necessity” ~ That is an inversion of a parable, the same way that VRM is an inversion of CRM. I get it, and its clever, but… the inverted meaning really kind of messes with the logic of the original parable. The original, points to what drives human invention: ‘need’. To say that we need the invention to mother the necessity (i.e. the need) is to almost admit that ‘need’ has failed to be the driver.

note: I don’t think this is the case. There is a need to solve some of these problems, but which exact ones? You can’t solve them all… and the ‘need’ has to be really like a ‘pain’ in the marketplace, being experienced by ordinary-users, and you have to target that ‘pain’ with pin-point accuracy.

RSS ‘connected’ with the marketplace and achieved a certain level of traction, probably because it didn’t attempt too much… If you open up the VRM mission like an open-source project then it could choke on the volume (multitude) of its own ambitions. This is the danger of this ‘open-approach’… there are benefits, but there are also negative externalities.

(…and Doc, sorry Blogger wouldn’t let you post on my Blog… blame Google.)

Every corporation and state that could fund development of solutions is blinkered to think in terms of centralised systems.

So, first problem to solve: public/collective funding.

All the other problems are feasibly solved by distributed systems (if you understand distributed/p2p systems), but because they are not subject to control, provide no reward except public benefit (and a warm feeling).

For such philanthropic enhancements to web as market we need a Cern equivalent, but crowd sourced by flash mob – to use the jargon.

Well, that’s my theory. Don’t let me dissuade anyone who’s already embarked upon implementing VRM technology.

In other words if corporations can afford to develop their own silos, individuals aren’t going to develop their own facilities individually, and no-one else will do it for them unless they get to control it (which renders it broken from the get go). That’s why I think the punters are going to have to club together to pay for their own tech.

It’s possible a community of altruists can start a snowball where sufficient development of decentralised systems occurs unfunded, perhaps it’s already forming? Is the idea to replicate the way RSS developed perhaps?