Category Archives: Project

The only thing coworking needs to be

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I seem to have a lot of trouble with terminological shifts.

When I was a young complexologist, “chaos theory” meant something about deterministic dynamical systems. But gradually the specific field of mathematical research got popular, and stupid management consultants (I say this with love) decided they would use the phrase to mean something about touchy-feely intuitiveness and dinosaurs and more like what they and the Ancient Greeks assumed it meant all along, about disruption and meaninglessness.

When I was a young theoretical biologist, “computational biology” meant something about agent-based models of evolutionary and molecular dynamics, and exploring emergence. But cheap computing resources became available to everybody and their brother, and suddenly the People With Too Many Base Pairs On Hand (I name them with respect) decided they would use the phrase to mean something more about sequence alignment, and not multiscale structural biology.

When I was a slightly older complexologist, “complex systems” went through the same exact bullshitization process as “chaos theory” did before it. Now, to be frank, it’s just mostly powerlaw-bullshit-on-networks (I say that with no little bitterness).

Luckily, “astrobiology” doesn’t really have an easy mapping to business consulting, so that one was kind of safe. But—amusingly enough—I didn’t get to do it for very long before the good old Ivy League Cell & Molecular Biology Department I was working in decided that astrobiology itself was bullshit, or at least not Cell & Molecular Biology the way they did it, and they kicked me out. What the heck; turnabout is fair play.

Then there’s “social network”, which used to be a bunch of circles and arrows, not a street term for “privacy invasion”. There’s “genetic programming”, which became just-plain-symbolic-regression. And “agile software development”, which used to be about bringing value and reducing the risk to developers working on software projects, not speeding up product delivery for their goddamned (and I say that with no love whatsoever) corporate managers. And “anarchism”, which only a few people in the whole damned world still remember means something about being nice to one another because it’s the right thing to do, not throwing rocks at coffee shops. And “conservatism”, which you may be surprised to learn used to mean something a lot more like “being reasonable and taking into account people’s differences”, not being an asshole about rich people getting richer. And “Pragmatism”, which isn’t about compromising your principles for the sake of The Law.

And so on. I’m used to it; I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. “Skepticism” for example.

And maybe now “coworking.”

Today we learnt of another coworking business closing down. And it looks and feels and sounds like the same old process of terminological failure to me.

You may not have noticed that I’ve been deeply involved with Workantile Exchange in Ann Arbor since before it began. It hasn’t come up much. Mike Kessler is the founder of that business, but it was a matter of coincidence that Barbara and Laura Fisher and I ran into him after we’d spent more than six months looking for an affordable space for our community of informal colleagues, and he had spent months building out a wonderful commercial space in downtown Ann Arbor on spec, hoping for a community to crop up.

The detailed story’s for another day, but the short version is salient: From the get-go, we understood the contingent realities of the coworking business.

  • You can’t sell jack shit to unemployed people, so don’t expect to make money by “supporting those transitioning to an independent lifestyle” (aka, “layoff victims”). Leave that to the government, and pure nonprofit people.
  • People who think they want a desk and a phone and a mailbox really just want to project an illusion of corporate-style success, and thus they don’t want to cowork, they want a bargain-basement price on an office lease, and a fucking butler (I say this with a whole heap of wry bonhomie). So send those people to a landlord so they can learn the prices and hidden costs of actual real estate, and not merely leech off your coworking space’s lease and limited staff and service budget.
  • Diversity of membership reduces the risk to every member, so don’t try to specialize in “makers” or “creatives” or “startups” and ferchrissakes not Realtors.
  • 30% of the workforce is an independent. That compares to something like 10% that’s a dopey seat-of-the-pants looking-for-venture-capital startup-style big-E Entrepreneur (I say this with love, and the knowledge that “entrepreneurship” is a cognitive disorder; I myself am a high-functioning entrepreneur), and besides they don’t want to spend one thin dime, so don’t even bother dealing with college kids or the local incubator’s castoffs.
  • Most landlords (but apparently not ours, thank goodness), the Useless Chamber of Commerce, the local Economic Development grant-givers, the State Government, the candidates who want to demonstrate their “effectiveness”, the Newspaper Business Columnist, anybody who thinks of themselves as an “angel investor”, and for that matter any person who has ever watched an unironic hour of Bloomberg Television? Those people do not get it. In their world, the only way to make money is to raise prices and offer improved services until demand tapers off. Coworking is not about quid pro quo, it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s not about being a landlord or finding arbitrary tenants or even—this is important—making money. You cannot make a profit by running a coworking space.

That last one’s important. We’re not communists, we’re not anti-capitalists and we’re not running some kind of pep club. It’s just that we’ve thought about it. You cannot make a profit selling community.

So the question is: what the hell is “coworking” then? I mean, I’ve disqualified renting desks to people, and setting up offices for independents, and all that other normal stuff. What is it?

It’s community. Not the kind you join because it “offers good opportunities for networking and professional development”, but the kind you join because it would be neat.

It’s church. Not the kind where you worship, but the kind you go to for fellowship with people from diverse backgrounds, but who are in the same essential and existential position you are: Independent in a world that assumes you have a “job title” and a “boss” and “employer healthcare” or you can “send a purchase order”.

It’s a club. Not the kind you go for help, but—and I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a supercilious asshole—the kind of club you join in order to build a strong barrier between you and the Pinks, the Normals, the hoi polloi. Though in our case, those hoi polloi are often the bosses, the politicos, the nominal movers and shakers of the “working world”.

We’re not them. We’re the 30% of the people who are independent of all that.

That 30% is all over the place. But whoever it is we actually are, we’re also proud. Of who we are, and of what we’re helping to create.

I’m not as full of hot air as normal, here. During the first two years of Workantile Exchange’s existence, Mike Kessler tried selling desks, and selling mailboxes, and subleases, and startup incubation, and nonprofit meetings, and maker spaces, and all the rest of that stuff. You know what broke every one of those business models? Those people don’t want to belong to a community. They want services, and they want discounts.

All this boils down to: sustainable coworking isn’t anything to do with office space at all. Any moron can buy a cubicle and set it up in her garage or her spare bedroom, and sit there and play My Special Office whenever she wants.

It’s not about “work” at all. Real coworking is about the “co-” part, about being together. Pride. Like-mindedness. About avoiding the risks and vicissitudes of sitting at work by yourself, not being exposed to the externalities of real life by yourself, about not reinventing the wheel by yourself every time a computer acts weird or a contract gets confusing or a lawsuit pops up or your dog needs a play date or you have too much work.

And (because this comes up) it’s not about being some kind of consensus-driven co-op, either. We remain independent, or we lose our self-definition completely and fall back to being mere amateurs with “lifestyle businesses”.

Nope. Coworking is a way of eating entropy. Redirecting risk using community dynamics. If you want to think about it in a confrontational way, it’s about co-opting the same social design patterns—colocation, team formation, complementary skillsets, tacit knowledge banking, and collaborative risk balancing—that corporations bring to bear against us.

It saddens me that I never got a chance to visit Carrboro Creative Coworking, and it saddens me more to see them join the ranks of those who have fallen. But it doesn’t surprise me.

We’re weird. We’re probably weird enough that we’re wrong in a lot of ways. It’s deathly tiring to constantly have to explain all this to guests and visitors and people looking for things we’ve decided not to offer, and just have it bounce off their foreheads’ Cognitive Dissonance fields. And as Workantile Exchange transitions from a failing for-profit to a stable what-the-hell-who-cares-about-money low-profit, maybe we’ll fall by the wayside ourselves.

I don’t think so, though.

We have more than 60 members right now who are diverse, powerful, enthusiastic experts in their fields. We have architects, filmmakers, authors, editors, business development people, lawyers, activists, traders, programmers, graphic designers, students, consultants, remote employees, marketers, and even a dilettante or two (like me). We have tequila tastings and book fairs, art gallery openings and WordPress Users meetings. We have the amazing volunteer contributions of Trek Glowacki, the honored and respected Member who’s been working for more than two years as our de facto “community manager”, and of Tom Brandt and David Erik Nelson who (with me) are trying to “manage” us into a new, more reasonable business model. And all the many volunteers among the Contributing membership, who have given time to mop and tidy and run events and introduce people to one another, share lunch and talk and offer advice, fill the air with music and chatter.

And tolerate one another. And see value in one another.

Anybody can be wrong. But see: the more different you all are from one another, the less likely that becomes.

Maybe to succeed in the long term we really do need to specialize, and exclusively rent desks to dudes who wear identical khakis as they work on the Next Google, or market more to women entrepreneurs whose businesses have been singled out by local economic development experts as leading the way into the 20th Century, or give discounts to poor out-of-work corporate layoff victims who need a hand during their transition to this unfamiliar world that has no “work life balance”, which only includes life, with work as a part of that.

Maybe we’re wrong.

Who cares? If this is wrong, it’ll do for now.

Every day it lasts is wonderful.

I’m fostering diversity of coverage in social networks, Nerdy

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Yesterday I spent a while jotting down a proverbial Idea-from-the-Shower. Briefly, it’s a social mechanism (scoring system) for driving members of a community of people to pay enough attention to a collection of objects broadly—that is, without copying one another too closely.

In the end, you’ll recall I realized that maybe what I’m interested in is a multiobjective dynamic, not some single metric that makes all kinds of side-effects happen. So I’m revising my goals and thinking a bit, here.

My arbitrary snapshot example of a little network of Ada, Byron and Charles looking at three items looked like this:

net_metrics.jpg

The scores, by my all-in-one metric, were (Ada: 3), (Byron: 1), (Charles: 1).

But thinking about what that all-in-one-score measures, I’d rather return to the separate goals I’ve inadvertently (and in my long experience, unwisely) collapsed and conflated here.

Let’s look at stakeholders. As administrator of this collection of people and items, I have particular goals I’m trying to elicit.

As administrator, as the set of “members” take turns adding new links to items, I want:

  • to minimize the number of items which haven’t had enough people look at them, because I want to have a sense of progress in our collective work; “enough” might be 1, but more likely it’s 3 or 4 people, especially in a complex problem where we really want to have unreliable members checking one another
  • to minimize the number of items that have been looked at by the same subset of people, in order to promote diversity of experience and expertise among the membership

In graph theory terms, I suppose what I’m thinking here is that I want to avoid making connected components of the graph: cliques (in the social sense) of people who all follow along together and look at the same stuff. Because when that happens, I’m concerned that they play off one another’s weaknesses.

So to get the diverse membership to do what I want, without necessarily trying to slap up a big chart on the proverbial wall and say, “Hey, everybody, can we raise Metric X please?”, I think I should be designing objectives for the members themselves to pursue. Individually, and competitively and collaboratively.

If you’re a member, I think you should try to:

  • “collaborate”: maximize the number of items you’ve linked to (which indirectly leads to coverage)
  • “diversify”: maximize the number of different sets of people who have looked at the same items as you (which pushes towards my second goal)

Now as a rule of thumb in multiobjective search, I always recommend one pick a direction and stick with it. I usually minimize (because the graphs are easier to draw) so let’s transform these into more mathematical-ish terms like:

  • “collaborate”: minimize your negative outdegree
  • “diversify”: minimize the negative count of different sets of people who have looked at the same items as you

(Alternately, we might consider “minimize the number of duplicated sets of people who have looked at the same items as you”, but that may not be the same thing exactly; we’ll look in a bit at that variation.)

How do Ada, Byron, and Charles do on those objectives, and what does this translate into in our static snapshot of a dynamic process?

                Ada Byron Charles
  collaborate:   -3   -1    -1
    diversify:   -2   -1    -1

If Byron next links to item #3, then we get

net_metrics2.jpg
                Ada Byron Charles
  collaborate:   -3   -2    -1
    diversify:   -3   -2    -1

If in the next step Charles links to item #1, we get

net_metrics3.jpg
                Ada Byron Charles
  collaborate:   -3   -2    -2
    diversify:   -3   -2    -2

Assuming there aren’t any more items (for the moment), then Ada has no moves, and inevitably Byron links to item #1, so we get

net_metrics4.jpg
                Ada Byron Charles
  collaborate:   -3   -3    -2
    diversify:   -2   -2    -1

Notice what’s happening to the “diversify” scores? The relative positions of the “players” on this score got better, then got worse and is now flattening out. Byron’s move eliminates all of Ada’s advantages. The final move by Charles eliminates all differences between every player, on both objectives.

This is a very limited example, but I’m still just thinking out loud here so bear with me. What’s happened in the meantime to my Administrator’s goals?

I have two goals. I want “progress”, and in this example say I’ve decided an item is “done” when at least 2 people link to it. So I want to minimize the number of items with fewer than 2 links. My other goal is something like “promiscuity”, which I’ll measure as the number of duplicated indegree label sets over all items.

  time         t     t+1    t+2    t+3     t+4 (Charles finishes it)
  progress     1      2      3      2       1
  promiscuity  2      3      3      3       3

This is interesting, frankly. I’m going to think a bit about that. But it seems to be working, in this toy example.

So, open questions I’m considering: What will happen if there are a lot of people and items? We started looking in this example at a stage where most of the possible links were already present; what happens as new items are added, or if old (“finished”) items are removed from the system? If the players greedily try to dominate one another on these two scores, what happens? If players act randomly, what happens?

What does this remind you of, Nerdy?

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This is just a telegraphic note to get this out of my head and onto paper quickly.

I’m thinking about crowdsourced proofreading, or recommender systems, or any of several other problems in bipartite network theory (to get all nerdy and crap). In general, suppose there are a collection M people, and each of them is looking at some subset of N objects.

If they’re proofreaders looking at transcribed pictures of pages and checking for errors, if person m_i checks and signs off a page n_j, then we connect node m_i to n_j with an edge.

If they’re web surfers looking at sites and tweets and shit and checking for awesomeness, if person m_i visits and recommends a URI n_j, then we connect node m_i to n_j with an edge.

And so on.

We all know a lot of different ways of scoring the things these people are looking at, don’t we Nerdy? PageRank, a bunch of network theory things, &c &c.

Me, I’m musing about something slightly different. I think. I’m thinking about confirmation, and collaboration, and how the step from one to two people vouching for something is “worth” more than the step from 17 to 18 people vouching for it.

Let’s score things this way:

  1. For each person, observe the set of objects to which they’re linked. Suppose for example that Ada linked to items #1, #2 and #3, Byron linked to item #2, and Charles linked to item #2.
  2. Similarly, for each item, collect the set of people who are linked to it. In our example, item #1 is linked from Ada, item #2 from Ada, Byron and Charles, and item #3 from Ada.
  3. The score of a person is increased by 1 for every item to which they link, to which a unique subset of people link. In our example, Ada links to item #1 (worth 1 point), item #2 (worth another point, because \{A\} \neq \{A, B, C\}), and item #3 (not worth more points, since item #1 is linked from the same subset of people). Byron’s score is 1 because he links to item #2; so is Charles’s.
  4. The score of an item is [some statistic of] the scores of the people linked to it. Maybe average, maybe sum; doesn’t really matter to me just now.
net_metrics.jpg

The interesting thing to me at the moment is understanding the dynamics of discovery as a game here. Ada hasn’t got any way to increase her score without discovering some item #4. If Byron links to items #1 or #3, he increases his score, and also Ada’s score indirectly, because she will then link to three items with different “audiences”. But if Charles follows suit, and links to the same item Byron does, that shared advantage disappears for both of them. If everybody links to everything, the scores are eroded away to 1 across the board.

So what problem am I trying to solve here?

In the antiquated crowdsourcing system of Distributed Proofreaders, there have been numerous serious issues with quality and diversity through the years. Originally proofreaders’ “scores” were just the number of pages they read and signed off as being “correct”; this of course led to click-through gaming that didn’t actually improve the quality of texts. But there’s still a lot of money on the table there, since I often see books in which a dozen consecutive pages have been proofread by the same pair of people.

This, to me, is a concern. Because of Scott Page’s work, among other things.

There’s a Goldilocks point here. If everybody does non-overlapping work, there is no community, and no chance for checking one another’s work. If everybody does everything, there’s a lot of redundancy in the work, and returns diminish quickly. But somewhere in between is a problem of sub-community structure: if two people consistently apply themselves to the same work, there must be an accompanying diminishment in their joint contribution.

What I’m trying to do here is reward coverage.

Similarly, I’m concerned with the sustainable quality of links generated by crowdsourced systems like delicious.com or pinboard.in—or even Google PageRank—as bots spew random-seeming links across the network. At the moment I have a search window open for “genetic programming” on Twitter, and seventeen of the eighteen hits are bots that simply link to Amazon affiliated books.

So anyway: just thinking.

If I had a collection of M players and N items, what strategy for linking to items would maximize the score of an individual player? The average score of the entire collection?

Later: Of course, I’ve done a thing I usually yell at other people for doing. I have several goals in mind, and I may be conflating one or two of them.

Let me talk about it in terms of aggregated system design goals, rather than individual game dynamics for the “people” in my sketched model: We agree we want to maximize the number of links between people and things (in the two examples I’ve mentioned, and in others like maybe political engagement, or club membership). The goal of “confirmation” means we also want to maximize the number of people looking at each item, so that we have many eyes looking at each thing at once.

My fillip here is that I’m suggesting that we should simultaneously try to maximize the diversity of subsets of people who have looked at items, to reduce correlation between people’s attention to items as much as possible.

David Graeber explains why Workantile Exchange is hard to explain to some folks

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Not literally, but there is a kernel of truth in this particular passage from his “On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets: broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture” [PDF] that informs my current understanding of how Workantile Exchange is set apart from traditional “economic development” projects. And also, somehow, it seems to be “about” the frustrations that Agile Software gurus are feeling, as the movement they framed as a fundamentally social thing reverts to a mere “strategy” in corporate life.

It might be helpful here to reflect on the nature of the violence—”force”, if you like—that police represent. A former LAPD officer writing about the Rodney King case pointed out that in most of the occasions in which a citizen is severely beaten by police, it turns out that the victim was actually innocent of any crime. “Cops don’t beat up burglars”, he observed. If you want to cause a policeman to be violent, the surest way is to challenge their right to define the situation. This is not something a burglar is likely to do. This of course makes perfect sense if we remember that police are, essentially, bureaucrats with guns. Bureaucratic procedures are all about questions of definition. Or, to be more precise, they are about the imposition of a narrow range of pre-established schema to a social reality that is, usually, infinitely more complex: a crowd can be either orderly or disorderly; a citizen can be white, black, Hispanic, or an Asian/ Pacific Islander; a petitioner is or is not in possession of a valid photo ID. Such simplistic rubrics can only be maintained in the absence of dialogue; hence, the quintessential form of bureaucratic violence is the wielding of the truncheon when somebody “talks back”.

I began by saying that this was to be an essay of interpretation. In fact, it has been just as much an essay about frustrated interpretation; about the limits of interpretation. Ultimately, I think this frustration can be traced back to the very nature of violence—bureaucratic or otherwise. Violence is in fact unique among forms of human action in that it holds out the possibility of affecting the actions of others about whom one understands nothing. If one wants to affect another’s actions in any other way, one must at least have some idea who they think they are, what they want, what they think is going on. Interpretation is required, and that requires a certain degree of imaginative identification. Hit someone over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. Obviously, two parties locked in an equal contest of violence would usually do well to get inside each other’s heads, but when access to violence becomes extremely unequal, the need vanishes. This is typically the case in situations of structural violence: of systemic inequality that is ultimately backed up by the threat of force. Structural violence always seems to create extremely lopsided structures of imagination. Gender is actually a telling example here. Women almost everywhere know a great deal about men’s work, men’s lives, and male experience; men are almost always not only ignorant about women’s lives, they often react with indignation at the idea they should even try to imagine what being a woman might be like. The same is typically the case in most relations of clear subordination: masters and servants, employers and employees, rich and poor. The victims of structural violence invariably end up spending a great deal of time imagining what it is like for those who benefit from it; the opposite rarely occurs. One concomitant is that the victims often end up identifying with, and caring about, the beneficiaries of structural violence—which, next to the violence itself, is probably one of the most powerful forces guaranteeing the perpetuation of systems of inequality. Another is that violence, as we’ve seen, allows the possibility of cutting through the subtleties of constant mutual interpretation on which ordinary human relations are based.

“Violence” here is used in the broad, structural sense we don’t get to talk about any more in American culture. Yet I think these troubled groups I’m thinking about—WorkEx and Agile—are facing it.