ProjectVRM Blog

In Privacy is Relative my column in May’s Linux Journal, I wrote,

there are essentially two forms of privacy. One is the kind where you hide out. You minimize exposure by confining it to yourself. The other is where you trust somebody with your information.

In order to trust somebody, you need a relationship with them. You’re their spouse, friend, client or patient.

This isn’t so easy if you’re just a customer, or worse, a “consumer”. There the obligation is minimized, usually through call centers and other customer-avoidance mechanisms that get only worse as technology improves. Today, the call center wants to scrape you off onto a Web site or a chat system.

Minimizing human contact isolates your private information inside machines that have little interest in relating to you as a human being or in putting you in contact with a human being inside the company. Hence, your data is indeed safe—from you. It’s also safe from the assumption that this data might in any way also belong to you—meaning, under your control. It’s still private, but only on the company’s terms. Not on yours.

This mess can’t be fixed just by humanizing call centers. It can be fixed only by humanizing companies. This has to be done from both inside and out.

There isn’t enough room in a column like that to unpack that last statement. But there is in a thread like this one, if you’re game.

I suppose you’ve succeeded when people start making fun of what you’re up to. That might be what’s going on with The Vendor-Client Relationship, a YouTube video I found via markfonteijn. In this video the clients — diners at a restaurant, a customer at a hairdresser — bargain over costs. I suppose this is to point out the oddities of doing the same kind of thing in a B2B world.

It’s not about VRM at all, but it does bring up an occasional misunderstanding about VRM: that it’s about negotiating on price. It’s not. It’s about relationship; or more precisely, about relating. If price negotiation isn’t on the table, or shouldn’t (or can’t) be on the table — as would be the case at a restaurant, a hairdresser, or most retail establishments — it’s outside VRM’s scope. VRM is about enlarging the table, not turning it over.

EmanciPay does put the pricing gun in the hands of the customer, but only for goods that cost nothing and are worth more than that. Which is why our likely first deployments are with public radio.

It helps organize our understanding to divide market activities there into three categories: transaction, conversation and relationship. Of those three, the least developed in our “developed” economy is relationship. (And it’s the most developed in the less-developed world.) The most developed in our familiar settings is transaction. With VRM we are trying to create more balance between the three by concentrating on relationship, even when the relating required is minimal. We’re doing that by better equipping the buyers’ side with tools that will serve both sides.

The kind of interaction we see in that video is about as far from VRM as you’ll get.

Yesterday I reported hearing that the New York Times was thinking about putting its editorial behind a paywall again. Today James Warren gives substance to the rumors:

Here’s a story the newspaper industry’s upper echelon apparently kept from its anxious newsrooms: A discreet Thursday meeting in Chicago about their future.

“Models to Monetize Content” is the subject of a gathering at a hotel which is actually located in drab and sterile suburban Rosemont, Illinois; slabs of concrete, exhibition halls and mostly chain restaurants, whose prime reason for being is O’Hare International Airport. It’s perfect for quickie, in-and-out conclaves.

There’s no mention on its website but the Newspaper Association of America, the industry trade group, has assembled top executives of the New York Times, Gannett, E. W. Scripps, Advance Publications, McClatchy, Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, the Associated Press, Philadelphia Media Holdings, Lee Enterprises and Freedom Communication Inc., among more than two dozen in all. A longtime industry chum, consultant Barbara Cohen, “will facilitate the meeting.”

I can see the headline already: Newspaper Bigs Form Trust To Set Content Prices.

Just kidding.

We do need to be serious here. The Situation is dire. Humpty Dumpty is reaching terminal velocity.

But don’t bother wishing the king’s horses and men luck with the fix. They can’t do it. No newspaper trade group, no collection of top newspaper executives, will come up with a creative solution to problems that have already earned Top Rank status in the innovators dilemma casebook. The best these execs can do is make Humpty’s fall a drop into cyberspace. They have to make Humpty Net-native. They can’t do that just with better-and-better websites, or with “monetization” schemes such as “micropayments” or other scarcity plays with a net-ish gloss.

As disruptive technologies go, it’s hard to beat the Interent. The Net didn’t just push Humpty off the wall. It blew up that wall and the whole world on which both sat. In that wall’s place is a wide-open space where abundance is not only the prevailing condition, but a severly reproductive one that’s especially suited to interesting “content.” As Kevin Kelly aptly puts it, The internet is a copy machine. One measure of content’s worth is how much it gets copied and quoted. How the hell do you monetize that?

In a New Yorker piece this week, Bill Keller, the Times‘ Executive Editor, said, “There’s a crying demand for what we do and, sadly, a diminishing supply of it. How we get the demand to pay for the supply is the existential question of newspapers in general and the Times in particular.” He’s right in all but one respect: that first person plural we. Unless he’s referring to a population of sufficient generality to include readers. Or, more importantly, hackers. Geeks bearing gifts.

As it happens, we (the geeks) have one. It’s called EmanciPay. It hands the pricing gun over to the customers (readers in this case) and then makes it easy for them to pay as much as they like, however they like, on their terms. Or at least to start with that full set of options. Whatever readers decide to pay, the sum of it won’t be $0, which is what readers are paying now. (Online, at least, in nearly all cases.)

Evidence:::

Peter Kafka reports this from the D7 conference today (over a Wall Street Journal AllThingsDigital blog):

Time for some polls! No surprise: People like to read newspapers online. Also no surprise: But people don’t pay for it. Somewhat of a surprise: People say that they are willing to pay for some kind of news.

My boldface.

I conduct similar audience polls often, though my subject is usually public radio. “How many people here listen to public radio?” Nearly all hands go up. “How many of you pay for it?” About 10% stay up. “How many would pay for it if it were real easy?” More hands go up. “How many would pay if stations would stopped begging for money with fund drives?” Many more hands go up, enthusiastically.

So the market is there. The question is how to tap it.

At ProjectVRM we propose tapping it from the customers’ side: for newspapers, from the readers side. We also propose doing it one way for all readers and all newspapers, rather than X different ways for X different papers, each designed by each paper for their own readers. In that direction lies a field of silos, all with their own scarcities, their own frictions, their own lock-ins. We need one way to do this for the same reason we need one way to do email.

Remember back when AOL, Prodigy, Lotus Notes, MCIMail and the rest all had their own ways of making you correspond? That’s what we’ll get if we leave content monetization up to the papers alone. They’ll all have their own ways of locking you in, just like retailers all have their own “loyalty” programs, each with their own cards, their own barcodes for you, their own reward systems, their own special ways of inconveniencing you for their own exclusive benefit.

EmanciPay will be simple and straightforward. It will make it easy for you to pay what you want (which may be what the papers want you to pay … or more … or less), and to do it on your terms and not just theirs. This doesn’t mean that the papers can’t have terms of their own. Maybe they have a suggested price, or a minimum they’re willing to accept. Whatever they come up with, however, will be informed by interaction out in the open marketplace, rather than their own private ones, where they make all the rules.

Think of EmanciPay as a way to unburden sellers of the need to keep trying to control markets that are beyond their control anyway. Think of it as a way that “free market” can mean more than “your choice of captor.” Think of it as a way that “customer relationships” can be worthy of the label because both sides are carrying their ends of the relationship burden — rather than the sellers’ side carrying the whole thing (as CRM systems do today).

EmanciPay is an open source project. When it rolls out, it will be free and open to anybody.

Want to help? Let me know. (firstname at lastname dot com) I’m serious.

The only problem is that development work on EmanciPay is just getting started. (I haven’t wanted to publicize it, because I wanted it to be ready to go — or at least to vet — first.) But that’s also an opportunity.

What matters for the papers is that there’s at least one answer to their challenge out there. And it’s free for the making.

(Cross-posted here.)

Peter Hirshberg tells me that we have a Declaration of Customer Independence already, and it’s called The Cluetrain Manifesto. Could be. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the 10th anniversary edition comes out in June.

Peter thinks what we need now is a Constitution. Could be that’s what we’re working toward with ProjectVRM.

Meanwhile I just found an old file in which I noodled an adaptation of Jefferson’s original Declaration of Independence. So I thought I’d go ahead and post it here anyway, and see what ya’ll think. Here it is:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all customers are born free, that they are endowed by the market with innate abilities to relate, to converse and and to transact — on their own terms, and in their own ways. When sellers have labored long and hard to restrict those freedoms, and to ignore and insult the capacities enjoyed naturally by customers — by speaking, for example, of “capturing,” “acquiring,” “retaining,” “locking in” and otherwise “owning” customers as if they were slaves  — and when sellers work to inconvenience customers to the exclusive benefit of sellers themselves, for example through “loyalty programs” that require customers to carry around cards that thicken customers’ wallets without fatting them, it is the right of customers to obsolete the coercive systems to which both sellers and customers have become accustomed. We will do this by providing ourselves with new tools for leveraging our native powers, for the good of ourselves and sellers alike.

We therefore resolve to avoid all relationships in which the privileges of loyalty are determined entirely by the seller, and to construct new terms and means of engagement that will work in mutually constructive ways for both customers and sellers, for the good of all.

We make this Declaration as free and independent persons, each with full agency, ready to form agreements, make choices, assert commitments, transact business, and otherwise act in the free and open environment we call The Marketplace.

To this we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our precious attention.

I dunno. It would be fun, perhaps, to run down a long list of grievances, as did the original Declaration. Also to clean up the sylistic clash between Jefferson’s (which I copied, pasted, and edited) and my own. But I’m too busy (as are many others around here) actually building the tools we need for putting customer independence and freedom to work.

So consider this grist for our mills. And an excuse to post something after too long an absence (during which we had two excellent workshops).

It’s almost going on two years since I wrote Why Surveys Suck. They still do. Case in point: Sirius, the satellite radio company. Last December, Mike Elgen in Computerworld listed satellite radio among 10 Things That Won’t Survive the Recession. Said Mike,

I’m sorry, Howard Stern. It’s over. The newly merged Sirius XM Radio simply cannot sustain its losses. The company is already deeply in debt and would need to dramatically increase subscribers over the next six months in order to meet its debt obligations. Unfortunately, new car sales, which account for a huge percentage of satellite radio sales, are in the gutter and stand-alone subscriptions are way down.

I’ve been a Sirius subscriber for years. I’m currently paid through next November, but after that I’ll let it lapse if nothing convinces me to renew. The reasons are straightforward:

1. I don’t like having no choice about what company I buy my gear from. Near as I can tell, Sirius has few or no third parties. They make their own receivers, antennas, and accessories. True, some car radios come with Sirius already installed, but I don’t want to have to buy a car to get the service.
2. Their gear is full of proprietary suckage. The dock for one won’t work with another, to name one problem. My old Sportster radio has a display that’s as dim as a nebula. None of the new offerings fit in my old docks (I have three of those).
3. I don’t like being forced to pay for something I don’t want in order to keep getting for “free” something I’m already paying for. (I visit that one here.)
4. At the very least, they should have a player that works on the iPhone. If other developers can get 20,000 apps on the iPhone, why can’t Sirius? (They should follow on other smartphones, as well as hand-helds of all sorts.)
5. Listening online should be easy. It’s not. The whole website is a triumph of design over utility.
6. I want to spool data off of the radio, just to know what I listened to and when. Can’t do that.
7. I would be willing to pay on an a la carte basis for lot of Sirius’ offerings. Especially their most expensive: Howard Stern.

I could go on, but it would all be beside the point: that none of this stuff shows up on the survey Sirius sent me this morning.

Here’s Sirius’ side of this little market “conversation”:

1. “Please enter your primary Email Address (required)”. Would it be other than the one they used to send me the survey?
2. “What types of music do you like? Please select up to 7 (roll over with mouse to see examples)” In fact I like more kinds of music than they list. Some would be in my top seven.
   
3. “What types of talk/entertainment/news do you listen to? Check all that apply”. I like Howard, sports and public radio. That’s it. (I like music too, but for that I listen to Internet radio because the stations are better, and there are many more of them.) They list Howard as a check box. Public radio doesn’t rate. Sports gets its own section…
4. What types of sports do you follow? Check all that apply.” I checked three. This is the only place where I sensed the survey talking to me, personally.

That was about it. Meanwhile I want to scream at Mel Karmazin (who runs Sirius XM) — a guy I have respected for many years — HEY, MEL! QUIT BEING SO VERTICAL. GET HIP TO THE NET. QUIT TRYING TO OWN THE WHOLE MARKETPLACE. STOP TRYING TO BE PROPRIETARY AT ALL COSTS. HURRY! THEY’RE WRITING YOUR EPITAPH OUT HERE.

What will VRM do to make surveys stop sucking? Two words: eliminate guesswork.

Surveys are ways of improving guesswork. But they are no substitute either for conversation or for relationships that transcend the mass-marketed. And that transcendance is required for companies like Sirius to survive.

So. What can we do on the VRM side to make it easier for customers to relate to any vendor? What tools already exist, or can we make, that will standardize and unify the way we make our wishes known for any vendor or combinations of vendors?

How can we offer to pay on an a la carte basis that the vendor can take or leave — but at least know that the money is there to ignore?

These are some of the challenges we’ll be working on at the VRM West Coast workshop on Friday and Saturday of this week in Palo Alto. Follow that link for more details.

The other day my kid and I were driving around Santa Barbara, keeping an eye out for cheap gas, when we spotted a Vons gas station at an intersection. The price was indeed cheap, but only for Vons Club card holders.

Vons is a grocery store. That’s how it’s “branded”, or “positioned”, as the marketerati like to say. Or just how it is, actually. Far as I know, this is Vons’ only gas station. Every other Vons I’ve seen sells food, not fuel.

Anyway, I bring it up for two reasons. First, because we didn’t buy gas there, since we were not members of Vons Club. That club is exclusive, because we were excluded. Second, because the kid and I goofed on the company. “Where does their Club meet?” the kid wondered. “Do they have a secret handshake?” “Is gas a kind of food?” “Do they have a gas aisle at the store?” “Can only Club members go there?”

So, from a VRM angle, I wonder how much business Vons prevents with its Club card. I mean, besides ours? Does anybody have any figures on that kind of thing?

From one of four nearly fruitless chats with Charter’s Internet service tech support this morning:

Step 1: Unplug the power cord on the back of the cable modem. It is usually small, black and round. All the lights on the modem will disappear when you pull it out.
Step 2: Wait 30 to 60 seconds.
Step 3: Plug in the power cord on the back of your cable modem. Wait 60 seconds before doing anything else.
Step 4: Restart your computer. It may not be required to do this step if you are using Windows XP.

Note: Please do not do this while we are chatting, as it would disconnect our chat.

Not exactly a VRM story, beyond the need for it. But anyway, couldn’t resist passing it along.

Health 2.0 is going on today and tomorrow in Boston. So is HealthCamp Boston. Says Mark Scrimshire, about the latter,

Wish I could be there. (Boston is our home during the academic year, but rigtht now we’re getting some R&R at our perma-home in Santa Barbara.) Meanwhile I suggest that everybody who cares about VRM consider the matter of HCRM — Health Care Relationship Management. (A term I just made up. HRM might be better if it wasn’t about HR.) Health 2.0’s concern is user-generated health care, its about page says. That puts it in VRM territory right there.

Here’s the agenda for Health 2.0. HealthCampBoston is more on the BarCamp model. A DIY agenda.

Among the biggest topics in HCRM in recent years has been PHR, for Personal Health Records. Search for that, with quotes, and you get over half a million results. Leave off the quotes and you get fifty-five million results. The more specific (and less confusing, with Physicians for Human Rights) EHR, for Electronic Health Records, gets nearly five million results.

This is a huge topic, of a degree of importance that verges on the absolute. It’s also perhaps the most sisyphean of VRM categories. I find that daunting, but there are many professionals in health care and related fields who have been doing a great job pushing big rocks long distances. These people are heroes, even if they don’t know or acknowledge that. Here are some links to get started:

• John Halamka, also @jhalamka
• Enoch Choi, also @enochchoi
• Brian Ahier, also @ahier
• ePatientDave, also @epatientdave, who also blogs at ePatients.net, where I just found this not-too-oldie, but goodie
• ePatients white paper
• David Harlow, also @davidharlow
• Mark Scrimshire, also @ekivemark
• Greg Masters, also @2healthguru

Send me more, or comment below, and I’ll add them here.

Tags:

• #ehr
• #emr
• #HealthcareIT
• #health20con
• #hrm
  

There’s much more, of course. To get thinking rolling among the VRMerati, consider this mind-bender at ePatients.net., and this follow-up, both by ePatientDave:

Imagine that for all your life, and your parents’ lives, your money had been managed by other people who had extensive training and licensing. Imagine that all your records were in their possession, and you could occasionally see parts of them, but you just figured the pros had it under control.

Imagine that you knew you weren’t a financial planner but you wanted to take as much responsibility as you could – to participate. Imagine that some money managers (not all, but many) attacked people who wanted to make their own decisions, saying “Who’s the financial planner here?”

Then imagine that one day you were allowed to see the records, and you found out there were a whole lot of errors, and the people carefully guarding your data were not as on top of things as everyone thought.

Also this piece of intelligence, about Twitter and hospitals.

We’re a little more than a month away from The first ProjectVRM West Coast Workshop. It will will take place on Friday-Saturday 15-16 May, 2009 in Palo Alto. Graciously providing space is SAP Labs which is a beautiful facility at 1410 Hillview Street in Palo Alto. That’s up in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay. (With plenty of parking too.)

It’s free. Sign up here.

The event will go from 9am to roughly 5pm on both days, and come just ahead of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2009a), down the hill in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum. If things go the way they have for the last couple years, VRM conversation and sessions will continue at the IIW.

The tags are vrm2009 and vrm2009a.

As with earlier VRM gatherings, the purpose of the workshop is to bring people together and make progress on any number of VRM topics and projects. The workshop will be run as an “unconference” on the open space model, which means session topics will be chosen by participants. Here is the Wikipedia page on open space. In open space there are no speakers or panels — just participants, gathered to get work done and enjoy doing it. VRM Workshop 2009 wiki is now set up and ready for more detailing.

Our previous workshop was held last summer at Harvard Law School. Here’s the wiki for that. Here are some pictures as well. Those give a good sense of how things will go.

I think we can get some clarity about VRM — and growth of customer power in the marketplace — by re-positioning what we’ve been calling “parties.”

Among numbered parties the best-known one today is the third party. Wikipedia currently defines a third party this way (at least for the computer industry):

• Third-party developer, hardware or software developer not directly tied to the primary product that a consumer is using
• Third-party software component, reusable software component developed to be either freely distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the development platform

In general, a third party works on the vendor’s side of the marketplace. However, the vendor is not generally called the “first party” (except in the game business, as Wikipedia says here). In fact, the most common use of the term “first party” in business is with insurance, where the term refers to the insured. (The insurer is the second party.)

So I see this as an opportunity. Let’s give numbers to parties involved in customer relationships, starting with the customer. In the process we can unpack some distinctions between categories of work within the VRM development community.

The first party is the customer:

The second party is the vendor:

The third party is vendor-driven, and on the vendor’s side:

The fourth party is customer-driven, and on the customer’s side:

Together, they look like this:

Here’s how the r-button might represent both sides of the marketplace, and how those sides are attracted to each other:

There are lots of ways one can look at this.

For example, on the left half is VRM, on the right half is CRM.

VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also about building fourth-party user-driven (and within that, customer-driven) services, which make use of first-party enablement.

We can also substitute user for customer, and organization for vendor, since the scope of VRM far exceeds the vendor-customer relationship continuum. Thus fourth parties are user-driven and not just customer-driven. The picture here would look like this:

Fourth parties will provide many services for first parties. In fact, VRM should grow large new fourth party businesses, and give new work to large old businesses in the same categories. (Banks, brokers and insurance companies come to mind.) Native enablements, however, need to live with first parties alone, even if fourth parties provide hosting services for those enablements.

Fourth parties also need to be substitutable. They need service portability, just as the customer needs data portability between fourth (and other) party services. That way whatever they can provide can be swapped out by the user, if need be.

A good example of how this works is email. Before the Net took off in the mid-’90s, there were many email services. Customer choice was between silos:

None of the email companies could crack the interoperability problem. That had to come from the user’s side, by way of geeks who defined email via protocols that saw workstations as the units that mattered. While servers were involved, they could also live anywhere. Both SMTP (which appeared first in RFC 821) and POP (which first appeared in RFC 918) were born in the early 1980s, out of the need for workstations to communicate with each other.

What matters for our purposes is that email enables individuals to do two things that are VRM hallmarks: 1) be independent of other entities (including both providers and vendors), and 2) be better able to engage with those entities.

Even to this day, anybody can host a mail server — or even a Web server — on their own device. Yet there are big businesses in hosting email, and most users opt to host their email on those services out in various clouds. So, just as mail and Web servers and services are Net-native, so should VRM enablements be Net-native.

Silo mentality is mostly gone from Net-native businesses. But it’s still going strong in lots of brick & mortar business categories. For example, the hotel business. Right now that business still looks like your-choice-of-silo:

With the customer in charge, it should look more like this:

Here’s how all four parties fit together:

For travel, third parties include Orbitz, Travelocity and other intermediaries operating mostly on the vendor side of the marketplace. They wouldn’t have to stay there, of course. They could become instruments of customers as well. There can be blurring between third and fourth parties.

But, as customers get more power, fourth parties are bound to flourish — and not just because they’re located on the side of the customer and his or her money. Fourth parties will flourish because they will help more intelligence flow into the marketplace, and help the customer both manage and apply that intelligence.

Fourth party business will bloom for every company that wishes to be user-driven and customer-driven. This will include countless new companies, of course. But there will also be fresh work for existing companies that already side with the individual in some way. This group includes banks, real estate agents, travel agents, insurance companies… any business that wants to side with free customers, because they know in their bones that free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

Even traditionally locked-down monopolies, such as phone and cable companies, are in good positions to provide, or help provide, fourth party services — simply because these companies already have relationships with millions of customers. (Not to mention old and in some cases dying core businesses.)

What will keep fourth parties from turning on customers, and becoming essentially third parties for the big silo-maintaining vendors — in other words, wolves in sheeps’ clothing?

The only answer is native individual power. This is why it is critical to provide individuals with tools that enable their independence. A tool such as PayChoice’s “pricing gun” cannot be something provided by only one company. It has to belong to nobody and therefore to everybody, just like the existing suite of native Internet protocols. In fact, these native capabilities should enlarge the roster of protocols and other enablements that comprise the Internet’s suite of benefits for everybody.

Kinds of work

There will be many new development projects and organizations involved in making VRM happen. Some are already underway and have moved far downstream. In the course of this, there is a need to distinguish types and scopes of development efforts, and types and scopes of organizations.

I want to leave the latter open for now, and concentrate just on development work. Here the challenge is reconciling closed and open source work — and to help migrate some of the former into the latter.

There are now perhaps a million or more open source code bases in the world. Most are small. Some, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and Python, are large and familiar. Nearly all are not run by companies, or even by .orgs. The programmers who contribute to the code base are inherently independent, even if they work for a company with an interest in the project. Such is the case with the many Linux kernel programmers who work for IBM, Red Hat and Oracle. It’s also true of Monty Widenius and David Axmark, who founded MySQL and came with it to Sun.

Open source code essentially belongs — in the sense that somebody has control over it — to the individual developers who contribute to it. The closest expression to ownership is usually the license. Developers on a free software or open source project like to pick a license and move forward without any further concern about legalities, including issues of ownership. “Intellectual property” is anathema to them. The only form of intellectual property that interests them much is copyright — which is why the free software folks invented copyleft, which carries forward with open source as well.

Both free and open source software possesses qualities we call NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it. These qualities make that code generative: that is, maximally supportive of the largest variety of uses. In his book The Future of the Internet — and How To Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain shows how generative code and standards work by locating them at the waist of an hourglass with many possibilities both below and above:

While all code is in some ways owned, it is controlled by those who write it. These include contributors, committers and maintainers. Some projects use just one or two of those terms. A good example of one using all three is here. Some small projects just use one term or none at all. Practice varies widely It is always understood, however, that somebody, or some small group of people, decide which code gets added to the base. The Mine! Project is one open source effort within VRM. ListenLog will be another. There will be many more.

What matters for VRM purposes is that free software and open source projects are inherently independent. Even if a company hires programmers to write code, both the code and its authors will be independent of those paying for it. This means the employed programmers, or anybody, can work on the code, and do whatever they want with it — provided it passes muster with the maintainers (or whoever decides what code gets into the base).

Closed source code for which there are no open source ambitions will play roles in many fourth party services and applications. Where we face challenges with VRM is with closed source code that does have open source ambitions. If we want to open closed source code, how do we do it? Craig Burton uses this illustration in his discussions of various options:

These options are faced where companies already have code under intellectual property burdens, and where code development is already far downstream and decisions about what to release and where to put it (such as in code repositories, with choices about versioning, etc.) impact administrative as well as developmental overhead. There are existing organizations that can help with this kind of thing. Work has already begun on our own as well.

A Personal Note

While I’m not a developer (the only code I know is Morse), I’ve been covering open source development for the better part of two decades, and have been working toward VRM for most of my adult life. I’m 61 years old, and most benefits of VRM won’t appear until after I’m gone. So I take a long view, even though I am as impatient as anybody to make things happen soon.

What I want for VRM is maximal enablement of first parties, and maximum business for the other three parties — especially the fourth parties that will grow on top of the enormous because effects of first parties in the world.

Because effects are positive externalities of public goods that support boundless economic activity. Think of them as private benefits of public goods. The Internet Protocol, for example, is a public good. While nobody makes money with the Internet Protocol, the whole world can make money because of it.

We want the same kind of leverage from first-party enablement of VRM. None of us will make much, if any, money with the native enablements of customers, and users, in the marketplace. (Though we will save much money and hassle.) Perhaps $trillions will be made because of those enablements.

In respect to what happens with first and fourth parties, I locate my interests primarily with the individual, and with enabling the individual. For that reason I look for minimal organizational restrictions on how that happens. I just want to see as much open source development as we can possibly bring in. This also means I welcome all kinds of organizational activity outside the VRM “kernel,” in the fourth party space. In fact I think we need that very much, and have for a long time.

My perspective here is something like that of Linus Torvalds, who makes a point of only caring about kernel development, and not about what’s done with the kernel. When asked about what happens outside the kernel, Linus often says, “That’s user space. I don’t care about user space.” (The distinction is explained at that last link.) The scope of my interests, however, is much larger. I do care about what happens outside the individual’s “kernel space.” I especially want to see business grow in the fourth party space, which to me is analogous to Linux’s “user space.”

But I don’t have the time or the inclination to care about everything. I need to focus. And what I want to focus on is enabling individuals, and getting enormous because effects out of that. So I rely on others to do the organizing outside of the individual’s “kernel space.” This does not involve giving up power on my part, but locating power outside my own immediate interest area, out where others are more interested and competent than I am.

In respect to those, I see my main job as helping make clear where “kernel space” ends and “user space” begins. Hence this draft. Hope it makes sense to all of you.

Bonus Link: Making a New World — my chapter in O’Reilly’s Open Sources 2.0.

And special thanks to Hugh McLeod for the fun images used here.