Category Archives: business

The Mirror Dojo: Genetic Programming for Agile Teams

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This is the current iteration of the Genetic Programming workshop née Agile Team Dojo I’ve been working on over the last few years.

I’m looking at the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana region for an interesting place to run it. If you’re interested in scheduling me for a two- or three-day workshop, feel free to contact me online.

You know how to do that.

The Mirror Dojo: Genetic Programming for Agile Teams

Genetic Programming has been actively researched and promoted for more than a quarter century. It’s a broad collection of design practices and modeling techniques for the “automatic” discovery of abstract patterns and structures.

And that means full-fledged patterns and structures: algorithms, predictive models, complete mechanical and optical and electronic designs, and even blue-sky artificial intelligence systems.

Some of the field’s big hits include:

Sexy stuff! Nerds like us love it.

Better yet: I can describe all the basic design principles of Genetic Programming in four sentences. It’s so simple to describe that I’m completely confident that I can help you you—a competent software developer working on an agile team—write a working GP system in an hour or so!

And that’s just what we’ll do in this two-day workshop.

But there’s one more thing.

You’ve probably noticed that I always put extra-scary scare-quotes around “automatic” whenever it comes up.

During this dojo we’ll be approaching this material as an agile team. We’ll build at least two full-featured genetic programming systems, and we’ll bump very quickly into those scare-quotes.

And that’s what this workshop is about.

See, I’ve been working in this field for most of 20 years. It turns out that even after all that time, there’s a large and troubling gap between the tutorials and demos of genetic programming, and successful problem-solving with GP. You can measure that gap in terms of time, or computational resources, or expected quality of results.

Sound familiar?

Much of the advanced academic research being done today in Genetic Programming focuses on ways to increase the computational power, to bring more processors and faster code to bear so that “automatic” problem-solving has a better “chance of success” on a complex problem.

Ah, look; more scare quotes.

See, in this workshop we’re not advanced academic researchers in Genetic Programming. We’re much better prepared than they are: we’re an agile team.

In the workshop we’re going to be exploring how to tell our little artificial “team” of “automatic developers” what it is we want, and how they should go about making it for us, and (because GP just works) they’ll be “releasing software” for us. What we’ll be doing is designing the rules by which they solve our problem: especially the ones that spell out how we want them to interact with one another.

Which should explain the name of this dojo. And maybe even why it will take little bit longer and a bit more effort than most others you’ll run into.

Scope: This is a two- or three-day workshop, for three to eight software developers, engineers, coaches, designers, scientists, and other nerds.

The majority of participants should be familiar with common platform-agnostic programming languages (Ruby, Python, Java, Smalltalk). They should be comfortable working in an agile team: we’ll collectively work in one shared programming language, and rely on automated unit and acceptance tests, rapid release schedules, agile planning, and pair programming. There should be enough laptops for every pair to code, and network connectivity enough to use github for version control and coordination.

On the first day of the workshop (6 hours plus lunch) we’ll establish the social infrastructure, and implement a simple but full-scale genetic programming system for symbolic regression. At the end of the day, we’ll choose an advanced project for the next day.

Because we’re all nerds, you and I both know you can’t “stop working” after just five or six hours—and that’s fine. But the work day for the project is six hours plus lunch. So no commits overnight!

On the second day (6 hours plus lunch) , we’ll use genetic programming to address a technical problem where results are obviously practical—and probably publishable.

In three-day workshops, the final day can be used (at the team’s discretion) for either refinement and public release of tangible product from the prior days, or for a third project using different GP design patterns.

Why?: The dojo is just what it says: an exposure for agile software developers to a sexy but poorly-understood technical practice with great economic potential in the coming years. At the same time they’re learning about the tech, they’ll be surfacing aspects of their own work, and the way agile practices mold project management in the “real world”: requirements, goal-settings, information-sharing, metrics, collaboration patterns, infrastructure, delivery schedules, and even the jurisdiction of management vs. developers.

Cost: The most important cost for this exercise is the participants’ interest and attention. If those have been made available, the only financial costs are for the venue, travel, food and board (where needed) for the participants.

Entrepreneurship as Social Evil

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[cross-posted from nontrapreneur]

Little-e entrepreneurship is the charming eccentricity that drives business innovation in our culture and economy.

It’s a willingness to accept risks that others would shy away from, in exchange for eventual rewards nobody else can see.

It’s the Earliest Adopter’s enthusiasm for a fad that doesn’t yet exist.

It’s the heady taste of hubris that helps you move step past thinking I could do that, and actually give it a try.

It’s an inordinate willingness to ignore risks, to forge ahead, to plot a course into the unknown. On a promise.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is the cultural fetishization of that risk-seeking behavior, magical thinking and obsession. It’s taught in business schools. It’s the sole focus of some economic development institutions, it gets investors’ hearts racing, it’s the stated core of our government’s hope for the national future.

This cartoon “Entrepreneurship” has become a pervasive economic fetish.

Why is that a problem? Look:

Some young women are naturally beautiful, and also naturally thin. Our culture’s fetishization of Thin Beauty has fostered deadly anorexia, poor self-images among normal women, the sexualization of children, drug abuse, and more.

A real cottage in the country is unusual, and can also be pretty and restful. Our culture’s fetishization of Suburban Life has fostered an industry of chemical lawn treatments, greige developments at the edge of every city where the windows never open, social isolation, mortgage debt, financial crisis, the necessity of driving everywhere, and more.

It’s rewarding and healthy to play sports. Our culture’s fetishization of Professional Sports has built media empires and lobbying companies, offered false promise to disadvantaged youth, encouraged drug abuse by even school-age athletes, glossed over the effects on city centers, and more.

We’ve fetishized commerce and craft into shopping mall sprawl. We’ve fetishized the complex consensus-bulding of politics into talking points and intransigent argument. We’ve fetishized combat and national defense into gun sports.

In the same way these other unusual but natural extremes have given birth to social evils, the notion of big-E Entrepreneurship depends on over-exaggeration and over-generalization of natural but unusual extremes: the little-e entrepreneur’s eccentricities of risk-seeking, and magical thinking and obsession.

We’re told we can be “entrepreneurial” church members, “entrepreneurial” social activists, “entrepreneurial” artists, “entrepreneurial” employees.

Think about that. What does that really mean?

You don’t need Angels or VC to change the world. They need you. They need you to rush ahead. They need lots of you in their portfolios; your rare returns are their sole resource. You are their crop. You are their slot machines.

You don’t need to monetize everything, or promise ten-fold returns. Financial capital is not the only kind. A project can make you rich in social capital, intellectual capital, individual capital.

You don’t need to grow forever, or to burn down to bankruptcy. Maybe what you’ve done so far is enough. Even if you disappoint business culture because you’ve started a “lifestyle business”, at least you still have a life to live.

You don’t need to think of people as tools and resources. People are people. This institution you’ve started must be for the people who comprise it, more than they are expected to work for it. Never lose sight of the fact that it is an it.

You never have just one goal. Your venture is not your world. Even the most obsessive investor will admit that reducing risk is as much a goal of any venture as increasing returns. When you begin to believe some subset of “winning” is the only goal, when your investors drive you to forge ahead at all costs, when your instinct is to cut away the parts of your life that other people think are important just to make it to launch? That’s when you’ve become a danger to yourself, and to society.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is just like Hollywood and the NBA and the Billboard charts and the bridal magazines. You are not going to make next Google or Facebook. Your idea isn’t as original as you imagine, your skills aren’t all you need, your beautiful office in a fashionable ZIP code won’t make your product any better.

And those successful, rich people you find egging you on, “advising” you and “supporting” you and “connecting” you?

They’re just as caught up in the illusion as you are. Pity them. It was their luck that got them through the maze. Not their skill, not their mentors, not their investors, not their “best people”, and certainly not The System as a whole.

The culture reinforces them at every turn. Is it any coincidence they’re surrounded by all the evidence they need to keep believing that their illusion is universal and valid? They’re swimming in success. They see evidence of the System of Accepted Business Practices and Rituals working around them, all the time.

Because they have arranged life so they never see it fail. They’re not allowed to see anything else as success.

Where are the Big-E Entrepreneurs whose ventures didn’t grow? Didn’t hit it big? They were torn down for parts and raw materials, skillsets and capital, and dumped right back into hopper to be fed into the machine.

Who are you? If you define yourself by your project, I don’t think you’ve answered the question.

What do you want? If you only mention your project, you’re a liar.

What are the risks? If you don’t know, I can start your list with this one: “I don’t know the risks”.

What will be enough? If you don’t have any idea, I’ll guarantee that “more” isn’t the only answer.

What will you sacrifice? If you didn’t say “myself”, then take a moment to consider the Big-E Entrepreneurship complex out there, waiting and ready, yearning to drop you into the hopper.

You’re a pile of raw materials.

Portfolio filler for investors.

Promotional material for your city.

Future donating alumni of your University.

The cover of unsold magazines.

Oh yeah, and you did some stuff once. What was that thing, that company you did back when?

That was your vision? Huh. Who knew?

Grasping at golden straws

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Yesterday Barbara and I attended a panel discussion at the Kerrytown BookFest called “The Future of Print Journalism”. I’ll leave the details to others; what I found of particular interest was the thrust of the discussion among the panelists, who were all editors of one sort or another who’ve survived in transition from being old-fashioned newspaperfolk.

On the face of it, the narrative was about the future of print journalism in a world where the business model has been undermined by free online content. There was talk of aggregation by Yahoo! (and Google, though nobody mentioned them by name once) and how it undermines the authority of newspapers. There was a stern comment from the audience about how bloggers stealing content from papers without citing it should be sued. There was a lot of realistic-sounding exploration of paywall protection of content and the apparent failure of newspapers to fathom micropayment approaches. A lot of discussion of “free models”, and what came across as antagonism from the folks still at the big plop-on-your-steps papers at the notion of free content.

I started being bemused half-way through, though. Because four of the five panelists explicitly described the economics of their business, talked about it worriedly, and then wandered away again into how crucial good writing is, and how expensive professional journalism can be, and all the other stuff that justifies their special credentialled sociopolitical role in whichever Estate they used to be.

I’m sure the fifth panelist would have acknowledged the business facts in an instant… if it only been brought up explicitly: Modern newspapers don’t sell journalism. They sell advertising. During the 20th Century, newspaper revenue has come primarily from advertisers.

And from about 1900 to about a decade ago, newspapers sold print advertising at monopolistic prices. They were essentially a cartel. Ads in books never took off; ads in magazines reached only widely-distributed subscriber demographics. Only the local newspaper reached the walk-in traffic that retailers sought; coupons really don’t work well in telephone campaigns; TV is ephemeral, leaves no record.

Yet nobody says of the Internet, “Those unqualified online advertisers are undermining our professionally-trained crack advertising team,” or “Do you realize what it costs to pick an ad to run next to an article on a foreign war?” or “Photographs of ham can’t just be downloaded from some website you know; you need professionals on staff 24-7 to get the quality our customers deserve.”

No, the discussion was about “the economy being bad” and “readers out there expect content to be free” and bloggers and customer bases and the threats and uses of aggregation.

I’m sure if there had been time to drive the conversation my way, somebody would have jumped in and said, “Yes, of course we know print advertising pays the bills, but nobody would buy the advertising and get the bills paid if it weren’t for the high-quality reporting we generate using all that revenue.”

But: Maybe people are still buying advertising. Just not from you.

Here. We’re friends. I’m just as predictable as anybody else: I’m going to talk about history now.

Pick up an actual print newspaper from 1820, from 1840, from 1860, from 1880, from 1900, from 1920, from 1940, from 1960. From 1980. Count the ads. Think carefully and look at the books (if you have access to them) and estimate the proportion of the income of each newspaper that came from advertising revenue. Yes, I know in the early days they were small, local affairs with maybe a thousand subscribers each.

But they got their bills paid. What proportion of those bills were paid by monies coming from the sale of print ads?

I’ll bet you a Get Out of Disintermediation Free Pass right now that the earlier papers had almost no advertising (including the money from articles somebody was paid off to print), that the proportion bloomed into a majority in the days of Hearst and Pulitzer and the Great Syndicators, that it became a cash crop paying 80% or more of the bills in the latter-day cull that killed all second papers in cities.

Print advertising was a monopoly. Still is, one supposes.

You can’t buy ubiquitous home-delivered print advertising anywhere else. Sure, you can pay sub-minimum wage people to wander neighborhoods and rubber-band flyers to front doors, or wait a few days and send out coupons in the Clipper thingie.

And yet. And yet. Everybody knows (and for once I mean it unironically) we all love the visceral quality of print, the solidity, the ability to page back and check, the clipping, the passing it around, the crosswords, the comics. The biggest fuss when a newspaper shuts down comes not from the advertisers (who are already gone by then), but from the subscribers. The people with the blue paperboxes lining the country roads. The ones willing to trudge out to the roadside in winter, before breakfast, and take in the paper and sit and read it in their homes.

Physical paper. People love print. People live print. If they get sad enough at the diminishment of print journalism, do you think they will let it die?

Don’t be a fool. They’ll pay somebody good money to pass it out to them.

Are people buying ads? Shut your stupid marketing department’s yammering up and look. People don’t want ads, they want printed information. Even the people who clip coupons would be just as happy to pay you if you just listed the prices of every item at every store in town. They don’t want the coupon, they want the information about pricing.

And so what’s the future of print journalism?

In many cities in this country, the one newspaper is facing financial crisis. In smaller towns and wannabe cities (like ours), “the one newspaper” is dying. Yes of course in all those places there is probably also a superlocal paper about high school lunches and church meetings, and an edgy counterculture free monthly, and a free coupon collector, and a free real estate listing in the supermarket foyer….

Like I said, The One Newspaper is dying.

You might think this is what it will be like: Like 1882. Or 1860 or 1900 or 1930, even. The Empire of news is dying, not news itself. Not journalism itself.

The advertising monopoly is dying. The ecological niche occupied by The One Paper is a goner, not papers themselves. Specifically, the One Paper’s national-scale ad revenues are a goner.

Printed newspapers will have to start relying, again, on the revenue streams they enjoyed in the 19th century.

And because it’s how I always do it, let me jink suddenly from historical analogy over into biological metaphor:

Big animals get big not because they are specialists in what they eat, but to take advantage of economies of scale in their eating. The biggest cats are obligate hunter-carnivores just like some shrews, but have very special characteristics of gigantism and complex lifestyles to keep from wandering around all day burning calories hunting. Big whales eat very special meals (giant squid, krill), like many other marine species do, but are huge so they can avoid flashing around in big schools all over the place. Big dinosaurs probably got big so they could reach or manhandle their very special meals, but littler species could as easily have climbed trees or ganged up. And marsupial lions and wolves? Giant carnivorous birds, or moas? Giant sloths and mammoths? Specialists, but big because of economies of scale in their diets.

In the big picture—in the course of evolutionary history—megafauna come and go. As a type, following a particular specialized strategy that depends on being gigantic, they’re often driven to extremes by the presence of a small fruitful slice of resources in their environment. Unlike their smaller cousins, they go out on a limb and optimize their energy use and lifestyles so they can spend as little as possible to get as much food as possible as easily as possible.

But eventually the limb is gone.

And there you are, you big pile of yummy meat. Surrounded by other kinds of specialists, who didn’t invest in becoming huge.

The future of print journalism is a feast, not a famine. The One City Newspaper, the national newspaper, the Inherited Newspaper Empire: that is the main course.

A decade ago I would have predicted we’d see the industry roll back all that expensive infrastructure the One City Newspapers have developed, in setting themselves up as megafaunal ad-eaters, and we’d end up back in a situation about like 1880. A dozen papers, each with a slice of the subscriber pie, with a little advertising revenue each to keep them afloat.

Now I’m older and not so sure. Now I see a lovely chaos, a bloom of strategies, a roil of useful collaboration and competition.

What I wonder though, is what was never asked yesterday: who will be the first to fire the marketing department and keep the writers and editors?

That’s the next wave. That’s the immediate future of print journalism.

Working out the details of a real options framework

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Suppose a prospective client approaches you to do work for hire. In many contracts for technical work, there will also be a requisite nondisclosure agreement (NDA), which may be unilateral or bilateral, but which in either case specifies that you (the contractor) will keep secret certain information regarding the client and contract.

Lacking such a nondisclosure agreement, it’s commonly understood that you could whenever you wish disclose whatever information you like about the name of the client, the nature of the work proposed or done, or even trade secrets you learned in the course of the conversation. Depending on the character and values of the client, one or more of those facts will probably be subject to nondisclosure clauses in the contract they want you to sign. And those clauses may (if you’re not thoughtful or careful) have no expiration date.

I’m thinking of one former client—a large Midwestern corn hybridizer—who made us sign an indefinite nondisclosure agreement that promised we would never state the name of the company. That’s it; just the name.

At any rate, let’s look for a moment at what you’re signing.

As we understand the law, until you sign that contract you possess the option to disclose whatever you want, at any time you want. Within certain extreme limits (libel, slander, state secrets, and so forth).

Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt as a contractor, and assume you’re not interested in revealing the pre-existing trade secrets of your client. Let’s just say you shouldn’t ever do that, and that they have a clear right to keep you from doing that before any are revealed to you, and that therefore the deal is broken if you demand the ability to tell anybody anything.

But common nondisclosure language also covers the broad range of knowledge and information that arise during the course of the project: not just the stuff you make together, but the name of the client, the terms of the contract, the outcome of the project… all kinds of new information that many clients would like to keep you from passing along.

What is the value of that option to speak about your collaboration with one another? Financially, I mean?

Well, the value to you might be substantial, especially in the current business culture: Assuming you’re a consultant, contractor, advisor, or other nonemployer firm, the relative marketing value of adding this information to your public portfolio of work may be huge, depending on the nature of the client and work. If you had completed contract work without the burden of the NDA, you would have the option to brag about the name of the client, the nature of the work, the details of the tools and cunning solutions you brought to bear, the amount you were paid… all inarguably useful information to trot out the next time you’re speaking with a similar client.

Lacking the ability to share any of that information, as an individual contractor or consultant, you have inarguably limited your ability to market yourself. Who did you work with? Can’t say. What did you do? Can’t say…. And (again, give the current business culture) that marketing value is not diminished even if the project was a total technical failure. So from the side of the consultant, it’s clear the ability to promote one’s own expertise has positive value.

Now suppose you do sign an NDA that restricts your ability to pass along this information for one year. In real options terms, it seems that you’re postponing the exercise of your implicit right to market your business. In exchange for compensation, of course: the payment you receive from the client, and whatever general knowledge and experience might be accrued during the course of the project.

So at this point it seems that the amount you should charge the client just to sign an NDA depends on the expected loss of revenue you will experience from limitations of your ability to market your work. If we pare away the decision to work on the project together, we cannot get looped into ridiculous conundrums like, “Well, if you don’t sign the NDA we aren’t going to have a contract.” The value of the NDA is not the value of the entire contract; the work you do for the client is what causes them to pay you.

The NDA’s value must be separable.

But there’s where I get hung up, somehow, so I keep mulling it over looking for a way to model the transaction that captures the risks and benefits of disclosure and nondisclosure so they can be made more explicit. Maybe because in this combined deal (contract-plus-NDA) there is also a set of complex options being created, sold and exercised by the client, I admit I get tied up.

I’m encouraged, though. Consider that a well-formed contract for work is above all an aid to the planning processes for both participants, in that it reduces the uncertainty regarding possible outcomes. As a contracted worker, you have more assurance of income in the near future; as a contracted client, you have more assurance that the project will proceed, and you have a better handle on the costs.

Still, the value of nondisclosure within one of these contracts feels complicated, though not necessarily from the standpoint of the contractor. What are the sources of value and uncertainty on the client’s side of this planning process?

Surely the client believes that by engaging you and applying your expertise and effort there will be positive business value compared to what they would achieve without your participation. Or perhaps your presence reduces the risk of failure by a detectable amount. In any case, let’s limit the scope of the analysis by assuming there is a clear-cut case in terms of risk and return for them to engage you.

But they clearly also believe—whether or not it’s true—that public disclosure of certain information will put them at a competitive disadvantage. As if you didn’t know it already, this is the assumption I’m most prone to challenge. It’s clearly the reason current practice so often makes nondisclosure a dealbreaker: it’s common knowledge that the revelation of trade secrets is expensive.

Now I confess there is a tendency among those of us who have been entrepreneurs or analysts or modelers or IT professionals or experts of any sort who type and draw on whiteboards a lot to imagine that the sort of trade secrets that a client might want to protect are the same kind of simple innovation that we create almost every day: better software, working analytics, cunning and insightful reports, graphic designs, improvements in institutional structure. Insights, call ‘em.

These “secrets” are the kind of thing we joke about around here by saying (quite accurately), “A good idea is born worth minus $25000.” Because ideas are cheap to formulate, but each one has real costs to implement. Over the course of a decade one inevitably hears the same idea pitched a dozen times in whispered tones as if it were made of gold: a real estate aggregator, a stock prediction system, a social site for book lovers, a killer app on the iPhone….

These are, in my experience, the most common kind of client projects: the sort any moderately smart professor or middle-manager or graduate student stumbles across in the course of their “real work”, sees unbounded upside potential of, and (without exploring the practicalities) pursues optimistically. And thus tends inevitably to overvalue.

In the case of such trivial secrets, let’s assume that the client’s model of the risks from disclosure of their “secret” greatly overestimates the chances or the losses, or both. Your model, or perhaps “the market’s” model, would produce a much lower risk for the client, and therefore a lower price for [non]disclosure.

But as an expert contributing skills to completing the project, the ability to promote the sort of work you are brought in to do is no less valuable to you—independent of its validity as a “secret”. You write, you type, you answer questions, you contribute insights whether they are building a hugely innovative first-mover, or a bog-standard also-ran.

So it strikes me that the problem in these cases lies with the quality of the client’s models of their intellectual property and competitive landscape. They overestimate the recoverable value (or underestimate risks) associated with the project, and as a result the realizable long-term value to them of keeping the secret appears to be greater than the immediate value to you—and to them—of promoting the work.

Because we shouldn’t disregard a qualitatively different model of the contract: Suppose instead of being client and customer you are partners, and you are faced with the decision whether to promote your project or keep it secret together. There is marketing value to both of you, but also risk from competition to both of you upon disclosure. And disclosure is irreversible, don’t forget.

So from a real options perspective if you can postpone the decision to disclose until the benefits of promotion definitely outweigh the risks of competition, you both win. Whether you’re partners, or consultant and client.

Hopefully you can see the same real options structure I do. At some point, if they’re paying attention, the client will eventually improve their model of the real value of their “secret information.” We just don’t know when that will be, externalities and uncertainties of life being what they are.

So suppose you enter into a suite of simple options contracts regarding disclosure in which (a) you cede your right to disclose the information for a fixed length of time (say a year) in exchange for a certain sum of money to offset your lost marketing value; (b) your client is granted an option to renew that contract for another year at its end; and (c) your client is granted an option to abandon the entire nondisclosure structure (including scheduled payments) at any time. They should exercise this option, obviously, when they’re out of the money: when the costs they will be paying in future outweigh the realizable benefits given new information.

What is the price for nondisclosure, here? It can be estimated as the loss of revenue you as contractor will experience from failure to market yourself. If your client receives new information at any time that reduces the perceived value of secrecy to the point it no longer seems to be worth paying you for it, they can abandon the agreement and your right to irreversibly disclose the information reverts to you. If at the end of a contract period they still perceive positive value in secrecy, they may renew (perhaps at a new price).

Now it’s been pointed out to me that there’s more than just this sort of “naive secrecy” I’ve sketched. While it’s common in startups and small businesses, a larger or more capable client probably has better models of the risks and values of disclosure. If nothing else, larger firms are more likely to be aware of real competitive landscapes and best practices, and tend to outsource development as opposed to research projects.

The secrets in these cases are not so much innovations as they are well-defined functional practices and information that’s been tried and tested. In many cases there are smart accounting models of exactly how much they’re worth.

But I don’t see how this negatively affects the calculation of the cost of secrecy. Indeed, it should improve matters and simplify for all involved if the components of the contract regarding secrecy are separate from those regarding work-for-hire. Give the customer the benefit of the doubt here, and assume we’re now at the opposite extreme from “naive secrecy”: now the least accurate predictive model is probably the contractor’s, in that it overestimates the value of marketing (disclosure).

What we do in this situation? I’m not sure.

And uncertainty is the key: that’s what real options pricing is all about. So maybe (after I think about it for a while) we can work the rest of the model out, and maybe slap some probabilities and prices on there.

In general, here’s where I feel like I am: The presence or absence of an NDA clause in a contract should not materially affect the expected cost of the actual work performed, and therefore it can be separated away from the work-for-hire clauses. Further, the matter of disclosure of pre-existing trade secrets (in either direction) is not what I’m thinking about here, and that should be separated as well; I’m talking about novel information material to one particular project, ranging from the existence of the project, to statements of the goals of the project, to descriptions of the particular techniques applied, to news of the eventual outcome.

This information would be of value to the contractor (and arguably the client, but we’ll ignore that) for marketing purposes, who therefore expects a financial advantage when it is disclosed. But the information is also (arguably) of value to competitors of the client, who therefore expects a financial cost should it be disclosed.

There is uncertainty associated with all these valuations, and with the probabilities of the events occurring. How do we model that in such a way as to make it simpler to separate agreements for work from agreements regarding nondisclosure?

It’s simple refactoring, really: The modules have very different functions, and yet they’re too often interconnected.