“Yet before our eyes, another real­ity is emerg­ing – or rather re-​​emerging, because it once served human­ity for cen­turies. That real­ity is the com­mons, which derives from a dif­fer­ent side of human nature, and there­fore oper­ates on dif­fer­ent prin­ci­ples than the mar­ket sup­pos­edly does. That other side is not the sappy, self-​​sacrificing altru­ist that mar­ke­tophiles posit as the only alter­na­tive to their model of human behav­ior. Nor is it the grim util­i­tar­ian social­ist. Rather, it is what­ever resides in us that wants to be engaged with and around other peo­ple – whether to accom­plish a task or just because it is fun.
This con­vivial side of eco­nomic life is beyond the band­width of most eco­nomic thought. The cor­po­rate mar­ket tends to repress it, and partly for that very rea­son it has been fight­ing its way back through the con­crete. Cyber­space and the World Wide Web gave it a vast and unen­closed new realm, much as the New World once did for the surg­ing ener­gies of Old Europe.…”

“Very fre­quently I hear or read of my arti­facts adjudged by crit­ics as being “fail­ures,” because I did not get them into mass-​​production and “make money with them.” Such money-​​making-​​as-​​criteria-​​of-​​success crit­ics do not real­ize that money-​​making was never my goal. I learned very early and painfully that you have to decide at the out­set whether you are try­ing to make money or to make sense, as they are mutu­ally exclusive.”

“The par­tic­u­lar dilemma, at this point, boils down to which part of ‘unsus­tain­able con­tract’ trumps the other. UF is claim­ing, cor­rectly, that the cur­rent fis­cal short­fall demands some level of sac­ri­fice. Babb and the union are claim­ing, cor­rectly, that a con­tract is a contract.

Both sides are right, but if they’ve retreated to such intractable posi­tions they’ve both already lost. If the Uni­ver­sity ‘wins,’ I’d expect ‘stars’ to start decamp­ing for greener pas­tures as soon as the mar­ket improves, since they’d be afraid that promises are writ­ten in sand. If Babb ‘wins,’ the Uni­ver­sity will have to take out its cuts instead on those least able to fight back – it’s not like the fis­cal cri­sis will just go away — and the anti-​​public-​​education con­ser­v­a­tives will have their lat­est Ward Churchill to use as a bat­ter­ing ram. Either result is ugly.”

“So for our inau­gural Wiki Wednes­day, we start with names. Arbor­Wiki has arti­cles about the Ann Arbor City Coun­cil, the Ann Arbor Trans­porta­tion Author­ity, and the Down­town Devel­op­ment Author­ity. Those arti­cles include lists of cur­rent coun­cilmem­bers and board mem­bers, respectively.

But who served on those bod­ies before the cur­rent casts of characters?”

“You didn’t have the time to read the 1100 page stim­u­lus bill. And nei­ther did mem­bers of Congress—by their own choice. Most lawmakers—on both sides of the aisle—were only given 13 hours to read the bill before it was passed.”

“Fool­ish reliance on Li’s model lead to dis­as­ter and it was made pos­si­ble by CDS mar­kets which con­vinced par­tic­i­pants that they had many obser­va­tions on the prob­a­bil­ity of default. They were con­vinced that prices revealed these prob­a­bil­i­ties because they had an insane mys­ti­cal faith in the strong form effi­cient mar­kets hypoth­e­sis and a schiz­o­phrenic simul­ta­ne­ous belief that they could beat the market.”

“So what should Alex do? Con­tin­u­ously deploy. Every com­mit should be instantly deployed to pro­duc­tion. Let’s walk through her story again, assum­ing she had such an ideal imple­men­ta­tion of Con­tin­u­ous Deploy­ment.
Alex com­mits. Min­utes later warn­ings go off that the clus­ter is no longer healthy. The fail­ure is eas­ily cor­re­lated to Alex’s change and her change is reverted. Alex spends min­i­mal time debug­ging, find­ing the now obvi­ous typo with ease. Her changes still caused a fail­ure cas­cade, but the down­time was minimal. ”

“Assum­ing you’re with me so far, what will that mean in prac­tice? Throw­ing out a lot of code. That’s because as you get bet­ter at con­tin­u­ous deploy­ment, you learn more and more about what works and what doesn’t. If you’re seri­ous about learn­ing, you’ll con­tin­u­ously learn to prune the dead weight that doesn’t work. That’s not entirely with­out risk, which is a les­son we learned all-​​too-​​well at IMVU. Luck­ily, Chad Austin has recently weighed in with an excel­lent piece called 10 Pit­falls of Dirty Code.”

“OneSwarm is a new P2P data shar­ing appli­ca­tion we’re build­ing to pro­vide users with explicit con­trol over their pri­vacy by enabling fine-​​grained con­trol over how data is shared. Instead of shar­ing data indis­crim­i­nately, data shared with OneSwarm can be made pub­lic, it can be shared with friends, shared with some friends but not oth­ers, and so forth. We call this friend-​​to-​​friend (F2F) data shar­ing. OneSwarm is:…”