ProjectVRM Blog

The shot above was made at the Kynetx Impact conference, which is the first one I’ve been to where VRM was a serious topic on its own — an acronym thrown around by participants, in ways that made clear that they knew what it was. No explanation required.

In other words, this wasn’t a VRM conference, but one where VRM was a central issue. The fact that the 140 people who packed the room included lots of developers, some of whom working right there on all kinds of stuff, including VRM.

I’ll have much more to say about the conference later. Right now I’m waiting for a flight at the airport and wanted to make a post while I had a shot at it, on the one browser that survived a really bad crash a couple days ago that seems to have affected some system libraries.

Still, a great conference. Thanks to the Kynetx folks, and to everybody who contributed. Well done.

Photo galleries from the VRM West Coast Workshop and VRooM Boston 2009 are up. Tim Hwang has an excellent follow up (Geek Insurance! — go read it) to the Getting Personal With Data panel, which turned (as we had intended) into a round-table discussion involving everybody in the room (including Adriana Lukas, via live video from London) that lasted two hours.

In discussions since VRooM, some of us have started thinking that a better approach to VRM events is to pick single topics (health care, governance, search, VRM+CRM, personal RFP, personal informatics, whatever) and have separate workshops on those. Or to weigh in on VRM-related topics at other events, as we’ve done all along at the Internet Identity Workshops — or as Keith Hopper did for VRM at Public Media Camp. Or both.

The problem is that VRM itself is extremely broad, and still lacks working code that applies to all VRM topics. In the absence of that code — some personal tool as universal in the digital world as the wallet is in the physical one — we end up scattered across many topics. This isn’t bad, but it might not be the best way to get traction in any one topic.

Thoughts?

Bill Wendel of Real Estate Cafe is one of the first people I met after becoming a fellow at the Berkman Center three years ago. What he’s been doing for a long time is right up the VRM alley: equipping users (whether buyers or sellers) with the means to become independent of controlling institutions and ways of doing business — and improving the marketplace while saving themselves money and hassle.

Bill will be at VRooM Boston 2009 and has told me he would like to bring up real estate as a session topic. I encouraged Bill to do that, and I encourage others to jump in and talk about it (and move some balls down the field too). Looking forward to it.

A panel at

9:30am, 13 October 2009
John Chipman Gray Room • Pound Hall
Harvard Law School

Who likes being tracked like an animal by big business, big government, and every tech hustler looking to make a buck from both? Not the developers of self-tracking and personal informatics. These hot new new categories are both driven by a growing sense that primary responsibility for gathering personal data and putting it to use belongs to individuals — not to companies, governments or anybody else.

These tools help individuals become both the point of integration for their own data, and the primary authority for what gets done with that data.
Self-tracking is how individuals collect data about themselves, while personal informatics is how individuals organize that data, determine purposes for it, and share it selectively. Together these tools inform individuals’ relationships with themselves, with their social networks, with the organizations to which they belong — and with sellers of all kinds.

Tools for self-tracking and personal informatics are new, already becoming popular, and in need of much thinking about how personal data is gathered, stored and shared. Each panelist is either developing tools in these categories or has experience with new tools and the issues involved. Doc Searls, of the Berkman Center and ProjectVRM, will moderate the panel, and we expect discussion with participants (there will be no “audience” here) to be lively and informative.

The panel kicks off Day Two of VRooM Boston 2009. It’s a free event, and everybody attending the panel is invited to stay, keep the discussions going, and help developers already working on these new tools. It would be nice if you registered here, so we get an idea of how many people will attend; but it’s ot necessary.

Panelists

• Adriana Lukas – The Mine! Project and The MINT Initiative. A leading organizer of the VRM community in the U.K., her work centers on “redressing the balance of power between customers and companies, users and platforms, individuals and institutions.”
• Tim Hwang – Web Ecology Project. In addition Tim Founded ROFLCon, The Awesome Foundation, and Information Superhighway. He is working on a book on the mechanics of web culture and memes online.
• Keith Hopper – ListenLog. Keith works on digital product strategy for NPR. He is the creator of NPRbackstory, was a contributing author for the book Collective Intelligence, and has done some other fun stuff.
• Ben Rubin – Zeo.Ben is the co-founder and CTO of Zeo Inc. Zeo has created and recently launched the world’s first personal sleep coach.
• Doc Searls (moderator) – Berkman Center and ProjectVRM. Doc is also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, Senior Editor of Linux Journal and working on a book titled The Intention Economy: What Happens When Customers Get Real Power.

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com, a major voice in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) field. The results are up at Doc Searls: Customers will use ID data to force CRM change. Much of what Neil sources for that piece come from my new chapter (”Markets are Relationships”) in the latest edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Now with 30% more clues!). In that chapter, Neil says,

Searls sticks the boot into customer relationship management. And even though CRM has become accustomed to bruising encounters, some of these blows hurt – perhaps because there are some painful truths being delivered. CRM, as Searls sees it, would rather have captive customers rather than free ones. To demonstrate this, we only have to examine the language organisations use when referring to customers – how they try to ‘lock in’ customers and ‘retain’ them after they have been ‘acquired’.

Later this week, after I’ve looked more closely at what did and didn’t make it into Neil’s piece (what I said to him, by emai, was quite long), I’ll post some of what was missed.

Meanwhile, a little summary for VRM newbies arriving from the lands of CRM…

The purpose of VRM is to improve markets by enlarging what customers can do, not just what vendors can do. The latter is necessary too; but that’s what all good sellers have always been doing. And there’s a limit to how far that can go.

Better selling alone can’t make better buying. Better marketing alone can’t make better markets. Better CRM alone can’t make better customers. At a certain point customers have to do that for themselves.

That point came when the Internet arrived. It was announced by Chris Locke in The Cluetrain Manifesto, with this very graphic:

There was an equipment problem with that statement. Customers were not yet self-equipped with the means for reaching beyond the grasp of old-school marketers and sellers—a school that is still very much in session.

VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) is about equipping customers with their own ways of of relating to vendors. In the larger sense, it’s also for equipping individuals with their own ways of relating to any organization.

Thats the mission of ProjectVRM.org, which I lead as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center. It’s also the mission of a variety of related projects and companies: The Mine! Project, PAOGA, The Banyan Project, MyDex, ListenLog, EmanciPay, Scanaroo, Kynetx, r-button and SwitchBook, to name a subset of the whole community.

Adriana Lukas, who started The Mine! Project, has something new at Market RIOT (Relationships on Individuals’ Own Terms): MINT, for My Information, Not Theirs. She calls it “a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users.” Its obectives:

• “to create an ecosystem where customer data belongs to the customer, is freely available to individual customer or user, in open formats
• ‘to help the individual to become the point of integration for his or her transactional data
• “to encourage development of applications that enable individuals to enjoy the value they can add by managing and analysing their own data (buying behaviour, purchasing patterns and preferences) and potentially benefit vendors, when such information is voluntarily shared by customers.”

This should bring up plenty of discussion at the VRM East Coast Workshop next Monday and Tuesday at Harvard Law School. It’s free. The agenda will be set by participants (on the “open space” model). In addition I am working right now on lining up an opening panel on Tuesday to lead off discussion of user control of data. Stay tuned for more on that.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t signed up already, go here to register for the workshop.