18
Development
Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.
—Eric Von Hippel1
Those who would adopt or create a distributed innovation system … must be prepared to acknowledge the locus of innovation to be outside the boundaries of the focal organization. And this will require a fundamental reorientation of views about incentives, task structure, management, and intellectual property.
—Karim Lakhani and Jill A. Panetta2
ProjectVRM was designed to encourage a distributed innovation system outside the project itself. It has been guided by teachings such as those of Eric von Hippel, and Karim Lakhani and Jill Panetta (quoted in the epigraph above), as well as my own experience covering free and open source code development for Linux Journal. The result is plenty of what Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production (see chapter 12) and von Hippel calls democratized innovation. So, in respect to the four concerns Karim and Jill raise in their quote, here’s the rundown:
- For incentives, we trust VRM’s mission to orient developers toward payoffs downstream. With two small exceptions (a grant toward development of ListenLog and EmanciPay and a Google Summer of Code student paid directly by Google), we have offered no financial support to developers and have not engaged developers to work for the project itself.
- The project’s task structure is minimal. We hold our own workshops, but also take advantage of gathering opportunities at various conferences and workshops where VRM as a topic makes sense. The twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshops (IIWs) have been especially accommodating for that. There are also a number of allied organizations, such as Adriana Lukas’s VRM Hub in London and the Information Sharing Workgroup at the Kantara Initiative (a collaborative development organization), led by Joe Andrieu, Judi Clarke, and Iain Henderson.
- For management, I stick to ProjectVRM itself. I don’t manage the peers producing code out on the commons or our committee meetings. (Others, more skilled at operating timepieces and calendars, handle those.) While I’m the main guy associated with VRM, I try to evangelize the mission without hogging the spotlight. In fact, I get much more satisfaction from shining the spotlight on what others are doing.
- ProjectVRM itself has little or no intellectual property, beyond the few developments we’ve led directly. Those are all open source and therefore have few if any IP restrictions. ProjectVRM encourages the development and use of FOSS (free and open source) code and principles, even when doing proprietary commercial work. On the whole, developers have followed those urgings.
The Short List
As I said earlier (and can’t stress too much), the list of VRM projects and companies is going to change and will have already changed by the time you read this. But I think it’s essential to give credit to pioneers. See table 18-1 for the list as it stands on the ProjectVRM wiki in December 2011. They are variously headquartered in Austria, Belgium, Chile, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, South Africa, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and across four time zones in the United States—as well as out on the Web and the Net.
Most of these projects are under the mainstream radar. They don’t show up in typical “Who’s Going to Win?” coverage in tech and business publications, or in the “What’s Hot?” line-up at trade shows. In this respect, they are like Linux, Apache, RSS, Jabber/XMPP, and hundreds of other code bases and protocols that are foundational in the extreme, yet call no promotional attention to themselves. In a post to the ProjectVRM list reviewing the early history of Apache, Brian Behlendorf (one of Apache’s original authors) wrote, “Apache fortuitously grew to dominance long before dominance mattered.”3 Today, Apache serves about two thirds of the world’s Web pages, Yet dominance was never what its developers sought. The same was true of those other foundational code bases and protocols.
The best of today’s VRM developments will succeed in the same ways and for the same reasons—and with the same lack of mainstream attention to their importance while they establish themselves.
Instruments of Intention
The Internet (as I reviewed in chapter 9) supports both independence and engagement, by design. So do some of its native applications. Three already qualify as VRM tools and as models for other tools being developed today.
The protocols SMTP, POP, and IMAP make e-mail on the Internet possible. Those protocols are NEA, meaning Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them. (For more on NEA, see chapter 9.)
This means any of us can use whatever e-mail server and e-mail client we like. They are all substitutable. If you want to switch your e-mail from your own server to Gmail or Yahoo mail—or back and forth between those—you are free to do that. You are also free to change your mail client from Outlook to Thunderbird to mutt or pine or SeaMonkey—or use Gmail’s, Yahoo’s, or Hotmail’s clients in your browser.
Before the Internet became widely available, all the major mail platforms were proprietary and closed. In my own case, I had accounts with AOL, AppleLink, Compuserve, MCI, The Well, Prodigy, and others I forget—and all are equally dead today. None of them could send or receive mail from each other, and most of the companies involved considered this incompatibility a virtue.
The Internet’s mail protocols made us all free to use whatever we liked and to communicate with anyone we liked, anywhere in the world.
Publishing
WordPress and Drupal are today the two major open source personal publishing and content management code bases. Neither locks you into using any one company’s publishing platform. The same goes for Dave Winer’s OPML outliner and for RSS, which Dave almost single-handedly drove to ubiquity, and which gives every writer or artist a power that once belonged only to giant publishing companies.
Instant Messaging
XMPP is the most widely used protocol for instant messaging (IM). Before XMPP, IM was as locked up and siloed as e-mail was before its open protocols were adopted. To some degree, this is still the case. (AOL’s AIM, Apple’s iChat, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger all interoperate in various ways through XMPP, but were designed originally as closed proprietary systems. Google Talk used XMPP from the start.) As with e-mail, you can set up your own XMPP-based IM server if you like.
These tools are native to the Internet’s commons because, like that commons, they are nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. (Nonrivalrous means use of them by one party does not prevent another party from using them; nonexcludable means you can’t make them scarce.)
Here are some of purposes addressed by VRM tools from the companies and projects listed earlier:
- Gathering, integrating and managing your own data.
- Managing personal identity.
- Setting your own terms, policies, and preferences within a freedom-of-contract framework.
- Establishing and participating in trust frameworks and trust networks developed primarily for individuals, to maintain their independence from any single company.
- Self-tracking, self-hacking, and personal informatics.
- Keeping records of communications and other interactions.
- Personalizing and improving search.
- Expressing demand, including personal RFPs.
- Programming rules for actions to follow from events of any kind, also outside the client-server “calf-cow” framework.
- Blogging and microblogging on open and substitutable systems.
- Freely owning and managing your own server.
- Interacting with CRM systems.
- Creating new companies or changing existing ones to serve as fourth parties, acting as agents for the customer rather than for second (vendor) or third parties.
Think of the VRM toolbox as one with many drawers, of which the ones listed are the first few. New tools will gradually fill all the drawers. Some tools will be all-in-one. Some will be specialized. Some will be (as with e-mail, IM, and publishing) offered as competitive but substitutable utility services. New drawers will appear as more tools, protocols, services, APIs, and other inventions come into use. Some tools already in use, such as browsers, may become more VRM-ish as time goes on, but it’s still not clear at this writing how to bet.
Is a Browser Your Car or Your Shopping Cart?
Among name-brand browsers, the decision to stand with both feet on the individual’s side has been made only by Mozilla’s Firefox, described by Katherine Noyes of PCWorld as the only browser that “has your back.”4 The State of Mozilla Annual Report for 2010 says, “Mozilla is unique in that we build Firefox to provide an independent offering focused solely on individual experience and the overall good of the Web.”5 Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari, the other three top browsers, are all products of giant companies that can easily subordinate the individual user’s intentions to their own commercial ones. While the makers of those browers try not to do that, Mozilla is less conflicted, by design.
The problem, meanwhile, is that the Web has gone mostly commercial, and browsers have become shopping carts. In a long blog post titled, “Enough with browsers. We need cars now,” I wrote,
For independence on the Net and the Web, we need cars, pickup trucks, bikes and motorcycles. Not just shopping carts—which are what browsers have become.
Personal vehicles give us independence. They let us drive and shop all over the place, coming and going as we please. In different stores we use the shopping carts provided for us; but we haul home what we buy in our own vehicles. We also meet sellers in stores at a human level, person-to-person. We can talk …
Cars, trucks, bikes and motorcycles are all substitutable goods. That’s why, if we’re competent drivers or riders, we can switch between them. It’s why we can bring what’s ours (our wallets and other personal things) with us in any variety of vehicles, without worrying about whether those personal things are compatible with a maker’s proprietary driving system.6
Later I added,
Nobody has invented a car for the Net or the Web yet. Browsers could have been cars, but they have remained stuck for sixteen years in the calf-cow slave-master world of the client-server model.
Think about how you feel on your bike, or in your car or truck. That’s what we want online. We don’t have it yet, so let’s invent it.7
This got push-back from colleagues in the VRM development community. They maintained, correctly, that browsers have 100 percent penetration on the Web, and that they don’t need to be shopping carts. We can make them anything we like.
I accept that. But I also want to see the development, and it isn’t here yet. Could it be an avatar?
Digital Nativity
In “Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenario for Military Planners,” John Smart uses the term cybertwin to represent a virtual agent, or a “bona-fide extension of me.”8 He adds,
Today, we are seeing how the datacosm is leading to the emergence of something even more interesting. With semi-smart avatars representing us on the web, we are creating detailed, quantitative and qualitative records of the choices we make about our lives, both major and minor …
With this new information, our avatars are learning how to look for ways to maximize the future value of our choices, both for us individually and wherever possible, for our associates and for the wider world at the same time … as extensions of our own and other people’s intentions.9
Sourcing Smart’s work, Venessa Miemis posted this on the ProjectVRM list:
what i imagine is an environment where the walls and silos drop away, and the orientation is shifted to a person-to-person type environment—this “car” that would be our tool of empowerment, independence and engagement, would essentially be a simulated self, or cybertwin …
the more i operate through my cybertwin, the more i understand myself, and the more *it* is able to function on my behalf without my intervention or guidance. interesting services can be built around that personal agent, making it easier to discover people, products, services, experiences, or whatever, that would be useful and meaningful to me … and there is a minimum standard of trust and ethics that i will tolerate when considering interacting or transacting with you.10
Is a cybertwin an invention that will mother necessity? We don’t know yet, because nobody has invented one. There are plenty of avatars inside virtual worlds like Second Life, but none in the open and very real worlds of the Internet and the Web. Yet it’s not hard to imagine that a cybertwin could be even more native to the Net than our corporeal selves, yet no less ourselves as human beings.
Certainly, something called a “browser” wouldn’t have had much sex appeal in, say, 1993, when the Web was already several years old and only a handful of people knew it existed.
Where We Are
All the VRM work going on today falls in the “innovators” stage of Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovation model, also known as the technology adoption lifecycle:
- Innovators
- Early adopters
- Early majority
- Late majority
- Laggards11
Across time, adoption forms a bell curve that peaks at number three, early majority.
The most widely popularized adaptation of Rogers’s model is Geoffrey Moore’s, which notes a “chasm” in the upward slope of adoption, in the middle of number 2, early adopters, between what he calls “visionaries” and “pragmatists”—at least for “disruptive” innovations.12
VRM developments only qualify for the “disruptive” label in the sense that they are new and may disrupt some existing categories (such as advertising); but those may choose to adapt instead, since they’re also native to the left side of the curve).
Where We Fit
In general, VRM tools are what Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor, in The Innovators’ Solution, call “new-market disruptions.” These cause “new value networks” where “it is nonconsumption, not the incumbent, that must be overcome.”13 New value networks also constitute “new contexts of consumption and competition” that may not be disruptive in the boat-rocking sense:
Although new-market disruptions initially compete against non-consumption in their unique value network, as their performance improves they ultimately become good enough to pull customers out of the original value network into the new one, starting with the least demanding tier. The disruptive innovation doesn’t invade the mainstream market; rather, it pulls customers out of the mainstream market into the new one because these customers find it more convenient to use the new product.14
This positions VRM’s usability challenge. For VRM tools to be used as well as useful, they will need to be as obvious and simple to operate as a wallet, a mobile phone, a bike, or a car.