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November 27, 2008
Notes 2.0 about Web 3.0
Overview: online capabilities in search, collaboration and invention follow each other in a cycle driving the evolution of the "Web" from earlier levels of maturity to later greater levels. This diagram illustrates the interrelated dynamics.
Each of the capabilities continues to increase in functional sophistication and reliability over time. For each respective capability, this change broadens its range of usefulness, which increases the range of user-roles that may adopt it -- as in, adapt tasks to include it in the task. While each of the different basic roles -- Producer, Provider, and Receiver -- will take advantage of enhancements, the roles respectively tend to drive particular rates and types of enhancement of some capabilities more than others. This relative difference is represented by their positioning in the diagram.
Interaction of the roles is selective but continual, as all are active all the time. It is important to accept that much of the "selective" interaction is speculative; however, any person in the role may program the interactions in various ways, such as to cultivate a particular scope of interconnectivity:
- one-to-one
- one-to-many
- many-to-many
- many-to-one
... or perhaps to fulfill responsibilities or special interests that reflect the following dynamics:
- Cultural: especially involving attraction and development; driving and/or driven by identity; strong focus on designing
- Community: esp. involving development and distribution; driving and/or driven by policy; strong focus on building
- Market: esp. involving distribution and attraction; driving and/or driven by economy; strong focus on exchanging
Those three fundamental "interest groups" are not simply points-of-entry into the web; instead, they are dominant perspectives within which web interactions and facilities are discovered, recognized, weighed, formulated, and so forth, by web users. As seen in the diagram, web interaction amongst roles facilitates a point of view and goal (design, build, exchange) that is characteristic of each perspective and has a high priority in the group view of potential web operations. As the web interaction becomes more and more enhanced and reliable, the web as a whole is perceived to evolve to a next generation for the benefitting users (or stakeholders).
The table below gives a closer look at the underlying architecture of an existing facility in use on the web, in generic terms of role and task. As discussed in the companion article Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0, the notion of "web content" is a high-level abstraction signifying what the web user supplies to the web and/or accesses the web to use. The related architecture accounts for what exists on the web as components of content, which may be intermixed, coordinated or integrated across roles to generate a more complex web facility.
The terms in the table below generically label what each role is looking for on the web and why -- with the background assumption that these items are engineered and reengineered over time to fit the particular "type" of player (e.g., student, artist, businessperson, scientist, etc.) within the role. As an example, the end-to-end architecture of acquiring an email, or purchasing an item from Amazon, or manipulating an avatar in Second Life can all be described in terms of the production, provision and reception activity involved, per the different parties that see to the main roles being satisfied. So, for example, while web content such as "stock", "factory" and "platform" is specialized to the involved Producer, the combinations of web content across the Producer, Provider and Receiver ultimately makes up the facility that the receiver may call email, Amazon, or Second Life.
To reiterate a key thought from the earlier Notes 1.0 article, the most interesting thing about the "web", after all, is that the interconnectivity and maturation allows a given participant to play multiple roles -- either concurrently or differing from time to time. The significance of discussing "generations" in web evolution is mainly in the degree to which a generation indicates reliable and adequate support of the user's intended activity. This will derive mainly from the enhancement and maturity of the web content in the web architecture.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:25 AM
November 22, 2008
Notes 1.0 about Web 3.0
Earlier I have written about how and why I hate the "Web 2.0" shtick.
In fact, demonstrating the disregard, I've generally completely avoided any semblance of writing anything about it to anyone but an invitational or hypothetical audience. Nonetheless, the popularity of the subject leads one to things said by others that warrant being remembered and shared. In which case, there is an ethical responsibility to give credit where credit is due.
Example: by Googling the phrase "Web 3.0", find a path to Sramana Mitra and more than a year of comments about her Web 3.0 "framework". For latecomers like myself, Mitra seems to already have "celebrity status" -- albeit earned. I mention that only to point out that except for the internet's easy way of cultivating coincidences, I may have never heard of her (as I'm sure she has not heard of me). I think that very fact is one of the main and most simply profound points of having the internet at our disposal -- which is to say that it reflects more about the internet than it does about Mitra, a point about which I hope she would share my appreciation. And it should fit into her greater scope of thinking about the web.
Suffice it to say that her framework for defining Web 3.0, offered as a catchy formula (Web 3.0 = 4C + P + VS... see for yourself), provoked me to say what I have said on her website's comments and again said below. I do not agree with her definition of web 3.0, but what I'll say below is a part of a different framework that can contain the points covered by Mitra's framework or formula.
Web 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0 have different definitions depending on what kind of stakeholder is given top priority amongst the many different kinds.
Let's overgeneralize and start by pointing out that the difference between having the web and not having it is simply that the web (the "internet") is another place a person can go to do something.
The biggest difference in stakeholders is between Producers, Providers and Receivers.
All three types are consumers, but they go to the internet to consume very different classes of "content"...
- Content is simply the material that the receiver needs, that they don't already have, in order to execute individual tasks to a conclusion.
- A task can be anything from self-entertainment to industrial development.
- In every case, the task is executed to conclusion, with the content, within the "workspace" of the web, without leaving the web.
However, a better instrument for understanding the evolutionary dynamics would not restrict itself to debatable examples, but instead would explain why examples fit where they do. This calls for the abstraction of a model.
In web 1.0, the recipient acquired prefabricated content in a closed package.
- Search created a transitional opportunity to web 2.0 by encouraging choice of packages.
In web 2.0, the recipient acquired prefabricated content in a modifiable package.
- Collaboration and personalization created a transitional opportunity to web 3.0 by encouraging comparative and cooperative content sourcing.
In web 3.0, the recipient acquires modifiable content in a modifiable package.
- Lacking any better term so far, invention strikes me as the transitional opportunity to web 4.0, as ontologies and cultures begin to take over a greater percentage of activities *such as* the creation and materialization of new products, outside of (but in addition to) conventional corporate instruments and academia.
What then distinguishes one web "generation" from another is the notion that an adequate level of reliability in the given generation's degree of task support can be taken for granted by most stakeholders.
And what these definitions mean, in reality, is that at any given time, some stakeholders doing some things have already been at a different generational level than others doing other things. Meanwhile, over time, the technologies and practices that emerge and mature in a generation of the internet environment also "level the playing field" across different stakeholders.
This ongoing leveling (or maturing) allows any individual participant to go to the web for more and more of the various things that constitute the individual's range of interests. As a result, the participant inhabits the internet environment more and more.
Turn off the internet, and they go somewhere else to do all of the same things, with a lot less affordable speed and range at their disposal.
All that said, it makes less sense to talk about web 1.0, 2.0, etc. than it does to talk about the relative maturity level of the internet environment as a resource (e.g. support levels 1, 2, 3, etc.).
The most interesting implications I find are these two:
- stakeholders will remain distinguishable as types, but an individual participant will occupy multiple stakeholder roles simultaneously;
- and the individual can readily change, thanks to the maturing web, from being a recipient to a provider, or from a provider to a producer. And so on.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:15 PM
November 16, 2008
Control: Got, or Not?
Execution means operations, and whoever is behind the wheel must have control; otherwise we can pretty much anticipate that things won't predictably get where they are supposed to be, and/or that there will be a crash.Control of operations, by definition, means controlling the range of effects produced by driving a collection of interactions. The usual approach to tracking degrees of control is to put gauges on each one of the smallest number of critical states (conditions) produced within operations -- and to use real-time gauges as continuously as possible. The correlation of the information from the various gauges tells whether overall operations are proceeding within an acceptable range of behaviors.
The collection of gauges is readily recognized as a dashboard. But the correlation of them is where the actual control begins. The diagram above shows the Archestra model for this correlation.
The model shows how to avoid non-sense metrics and focus on essential observations and connections. For example, there is a shared boundary between Priority and Plan, where the sharing indicates the need for an instrument that coordinates the priority and the plan. The instrument is Policy. Meanwhile, the primary rational coordinator of Priority and Quality is a Standard. And for example, the primary rational coordinator of Accounting and Reporting is Rules.
Each part of the model is a part that has an independent definition and can be independently produced, implemented, tracked and changed. In putting all the parts to use, procurement and architecture and engineering are required to assure that they can interact in an appropriate way; while management controls assure that they probably will interact appropriately.
The explanation so far leaves two areas for further clarification.
First, the model shows four "parts" that are more like regions: Priority, Plan, Activity, and Quality. Many people may detect some similarity in this quadruplet to earlier models such as the "Deming cycle", so it is important to note that the terms in the Archestra model do not attempt to share the Deming vocabulary or any other. In the Archestra model here,
- Priority refers to identifying and grading preferences, which logically precedes the other three terms as a management or "controls" concern.
- Plan is seen as step two, by which priorities are organized to be actionable with presumed resources.
- Activity then logically follows the plans.
- And Quality -- although it is always a target and likely referenced in both prioritizing and planning -- is not actually in the sequence until Activity has caused some output or outcome that must be held against the need for quality. In a control model, the place of this last step is important because quality must practically pertain to all actuals, not hypothetically pertain to all possibles. In fact, a major intent of building controls to this model would be to achieve streamlining and transparency of observations about each part, so that as little time as possible is required to get awareness of whether priorities and quality are aligned. Misalignment is dealt with by corrections.
Second, let's take one of the four main items just discussed, for example Quality: the model shows that two of its shared boundaries are Standard and Process. But what about the other two apparent boundaries -- Practices and Goals? Frankly, this may be a flaw in the visual representation offered. However, the intent here is not that the Practices and Goals arrows connecting Monitoring, Modeling and Accounting are boundaries. Instead, using Quality again as the example, Modeling is the primary referent for Quality, and if Modeling is to be able to succeed as the referent for Quality, then Modeling must be logically complemented by the definitions of Monitoring and Accounting. Likewise, Reporting (aligned with defined Rules and defined Events) is the primary referent for Plans. And so on.
Customarily, Archestra models offer "maps" to use for identifying defects, discontinuities, or other problems that exist in an already active environment. The model is an abstraction and can be taken prescriptively, but it does not assume that the actual environment is already organized as illustrated. The argument of the model is that its illustrated organization can comparatively expose an important disorganization in an existing actual environment, and help to promote the source of the disorganization to a high level of corrective attention.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:56 AM
November 1, 2008
What Matters versus What Counts, Encore
Any time you're busy with analysis, construction or movement, you're working on "distinctions". Such efforts generally result in ideas like Part X not Part Y or more vs. less; newer vs. older; or near vs. far (and here vs. there) ... These general differences each go on to be both specified and named with much more precision, for particular situations.
These efforts aren't happening by accident. So we often take it for granted that we should really bother seriously with their outcomes. But this default attitude might be a mistake.
Now that John Bogle's new book Enough is published, one of the fundamental concepts underlying archestra's separated definitions of "value" versus "worth" will be in the spotlight on a multinational basis for a while.
Outside of the book, but to recap archestra notes, there are a number of ways to summarize the working idea involved, such as the three cases below. In all of them, there is the underlying base dynamic that some kind of effort, let's call it work, is producing some measured distinction -- more... better... enough, or whatever -- that didn't exist before the work was done.
But all of the cases point at the need for understanding that unless we know what matters, counting by that measure is always possible but risks being (at least) irrelevant or even (at most) irresponsible.
The Who Cares Case: In this instance, unless a distinction causes us to consider each element it creates in some way different from before, the distinction would not be "significant"... But if the distinction is significant then we say it has value. Still, the value that it has may be irrelevant to some parties, while crucial to other parties. So that same value has a different worth to one party versus the other. The problem, then, is in diligent pursuit of a worthless value.
The Hero Case: in this instance, the usual reference is the old saying "it's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." On that note, first consider the ersatz "Government Employee's Credo" which says:
We the Willing,
Led by the Unknowing,
are doing the Impossible
for the Ungrateful.We have done so much,
for so long,
with so little,
that we are now Qualified
to do Anything
with Nothing.
The issue being described, by the largely "invisible" public service workforce, is really the issue of character, which is often described as "the quality you choose to exemplify when nobody is watching". This is pointing at the decision to pursue the correct value, especially in the face of substantial opportunity (or worse, pressure such as from politics, greed or fear) to avoid responsibility for pursuing it.
The Do the Right Work versus Do the Work Right Case: In this case, the issue comes up in so-called "performance" measures, where confusion between compliance and progress is rife. The classic examples today are problems such as "learning to test well" versus "acquiring actionable knowledge"; the pre-crash share price of Enron; and of course the ever popular joining up with the legions of "the unhappy rich". Scorekeeping is seemingly inevitable, but there's nothing better than keeping the wrong kind of score to put new clothes on the emperor.
In short, value is what counts, but worth is what matters. Sadly, so much of what appears to be valuable can easily turn out to be worthless.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:33 AM