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:

• the “automatic” rediscovery of the basic rules of physics [PDF] from digitized video of experimental systems,
• the complete and “automatic” redesign of an antenna for a space probe,
• systems that let robots “introspect” to find ways of walking, even when seriously damaged,
• “automated” stock trading systems,
• patentable commercial analog circuit and optical designs,
• “automatic” design of backgammon players [PDF], and
• “automatic” discovery of code patches for real, working software [PDF].

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.

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.

Workantile Exchange is a coworking club for freelancers and remote employees.

It’s not a cheap office. It’s not just for nerds. And it’s definitely not an “incubator”.

It’s a professional community of peers.

Members of the club can use the facility at 118 S. Main Street in Ann Arbor whenever they want, 24 hours a day. For work or meetings, professional or social interaction, to get away or to get together.

Current Members’ “official” professions include architecture, film production, business development, scientific consulting, writing, history, graphic arts, music, engineering, trading, publishing, programming, activism, journalism, accounting and marketing.

And you’ll find most folks around here know a lot of other useful stuff as well.

The Mission

Workantile Exchange is a social enterprise, and it’s been in existence for about two years. At the moment there are about 60 Members.

Our mission is to support the existing independence of our Members by reducing their social and physical isolation from colleagues. To that end we promote fellowship, collaboration, and training among our Members, and outreach to the broader community. We help our Members collaborate with one another, and not just in their work.

Why Would Anyone Do That?

According to Forbes Magazine, at least 25% of the current US workforce are freelancers. That number is growing.

Our Members pay their monthly dues to cowork here because they have access to one another. Most of us have offices somewhere else. As a rule we’re not looking for work, or swapping business cards to “network”, or trying to “grow”—at least not in the way most other business associations seem to think is crucial.

We don’t even sell stuff to one another. I know! What can we be thinking?

Because we’re traditionally physically and socially isolated, independent workers and remote employees often experience more professional risk than the equivalent corporate employees sitting in well-staffed 9-to-5 office building.

So we work alongside one another. When you’re at Workantile Exchange, it’s not just your cat there in the room, it’s a bunch of real human people. Professionals, each with a different perspective, who might have already dealt with the same problems you’ve got. Who probably have wildly different and very useful skills and experience.

Coworking together lets us bounce ideas off each other, hand off or simplify extra work, and draw on one another’s astounding collective expertise. Unlike those sitting in their basement “home office”, we can interact with one another, whether it’s to ask a quick question or to get together with and form a well-staffed project team.

We all still work on different things. We’re still independents and remote employees. And to be honest we’re typically very busy.

But by working together, we’re all better off.

And of course there’s the Pizza Lunch. And the Bourbon Tasting. And Game Night. And Night at the Races. And the Friendly League….

The Clubhouse

We maintain about 3200 square feet of open space in downtown Ann Arbor, in a renovated 1860s storefront. There are two small conference rooms available for Members to reserve, and a tiny phone room where you can use your cell phone. Otherwise, the space is broken up into two large shared spaces. All the furniture is mobile, and Members are encouraged to rearrange it to suit their needs. Nobody “gets a desk”.

The large ground floor “Café Level” tends to be the daytime, conversational workspace. The large mezzanine “Training Loft” tends to be the quiet daytime space, but has whiteboards and projectors so it gets used for events in evenings.

We also have a small kitchen with fridge and coffeemaker, and of course a bathroom. There are lockers for Members’ day use, a projector for meetings, and indoor bike racks for smart commuters. Some of our Members are kind enough to share their printers and scanners for office documents. Healthy (and unhealthy) snacks are available for a donation. There’s even a centralized speaker system that lets any Member play their music in the background. Very soon we’ll be adding a small circulating library of books and games: entirely on loan from Members, made available for other Members’ use.

Outreach Events

You’re probably reading this now because you’re attending one of our Outreach Events.

We know that space for public meetings in downtown Ann Arbor is at a premium.

We also think it’s crucial to bring together freelancers, independents and remote employees with the rest of the local community.

The best way we know to do that is by supporting users’ groups, training classes, community fairs and parades, and similar social events.

So we make our space available for selected events in keeping with our mission, and for events sponsored by Workantile Members (as long as they don’t disrupt others’ work). We don’t charge much: 10% of fees collected. All we ask in return is that you allow interested Workantile Members to attend your event, that you’re respectful of the space and the Workantile Members who’ve invited you to share it, and that you leave it at least as clean as you found it.

Contact our event coordinators by email to ask about scheduling an event.

Membership

You don’t have to be a freelancer or a remote employee to join. You just need to be a person.

No, really: Membership is not available to corporations or other institutions. You personally are enrolling as a member of the club, even if somebody else is paying for you.

Day Passes cost $15, and allow you to use the public spaces in the clubhouse. They don’t allow scheduled reservations of the conference rooms.

A Supporting Membership costs $100/month, and gives you access to the clubhouse up to six days per month.

A Full Membership costs $160/month, and gives you 24-hour access, 7 days a week. You’ll be expected to spend a couple of hours a week participating in community events and supporting the mission of Workantile Exchange.

A Nose-to-the-Grindstone Membership costs $250/month, and gives you the same benefits as a Full Membership, with no social obligations.

For the time being there’s an informal membership application process; the contact information is on the website.

For more information

Information on Workantile membership, scheduling an Outreach Event, and Coworking in general is available at http://workantile.com

Developing an awesome Genetic Programming system… from scratch

The Point:

We often run these agile coding exercises as if user stories and acceptance tests drop from the sky. In real projects, they’re typically the biggest source of confusion and pain—even in projects we’re working on by ourselves. The subject matter we’ll explore here, Genetic Programming, is hugely sexy, technically simple, and offers only trivial coding challenges.

You might wonder why so few people use it, then, after 20 years. Why it hasn’t changed the world and made artificial intelligence part of our everyday lives.

The answers to those questions have nothing to do with the computer.

The Structure:

Two or three sessions, each about 2 hours.

We’ll run the sessions in a CodingDojo format, much like the “coding randori” we’ve seen in earlier CraftsmanGuild meetings, where there’s one “driver” and one “navigator” pairing on a laptop connected to a projector, with the entire “audience” helping them along the way as they write code (and do chores).

If it seems practical in a later session, we may split into two teams (still with one customer and one project).

I’ll role-play “the customer representative” for a customer who’s off-site, with the rest of the group acting as “the dev team”.

In addition to the coding computer, we’ll set up a projector up showing a live PivotalTracker instance where we can collect, sort and make progress on stories as an integral part of the development process.

During the first iteration we’ll decide on language and infrastructure, based on who’s there and what they want and know.

As code is written it’ll be committed to the github project (so the audience can fork it and work along), but we’ll have formal review sessions with “the customer” accepting or declining particular solutions after every iteration, looking at the stories we worked on and gathering new ones as they crop up.

Participants:

…should have used some modern testing framework, but they don’t need to be experts (or evangelists) at either TDD or BDD. They should be comfortable, but don’t need to be fluent, in at least one modern programming language like Java, Ruby, Python, &c. They should at least have looked at pivotaltracker.com to familiarize themselves with the feature set and story-sorting idiom.

The language we pick should be the one which most participants are most comfortable using when they do real work. Whatever language and infrastructure we decide on, it shouldn’t be an obstacle to take a simple user story like “Adding two numbers together should return their sum” and actually write the acceptance test, and then run it.

The Project:

The Customer’s overall goal is to build a Genetic Programming system that can accept a set of data, a set of mathematical primitives, and will evolve mathematical equations of the form that fit the data. Here’s an (antique!) Java applet that does something along those lines already.

This sort of GP project typically breaks down into five chunks:

• build a simple but full-featured interpreter for a domain-specific language (DSL) intended for mathematical modeling
• build an evaluator that determines how well an arbitrary DSL script matches target data
• write methods to create random programs, and also mutate and cross over DSL scripts
• build a simple symbolic regression system that fits numerical data with arbitrary mathematical models
• adapt to some minor problems that may arise along the way

These may sound like big, ambitious steps, but in fact they’re all technically simple.

The goal of the dojo is not to learn to type something quickly or get as much done as possible.

It’s designed so we adapt the emerging codebase and our collective understanding of the problem the customer is asking for, in a context where there are no “tricks” (I won’t be lying to you, except maybe by omission), but where there are plenty of traps.

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?

Read more…

Was it to inform us? The easy targets—your thesis advisor and chairman and dean and editor and even unto your spouse and parents—they already pretty much know all they need to about this stuff. Everybody outside that social circle within telephone reach, odds are, doesn’t care.

Was it to promote your field? Past your thesis advisor/chairman/dean/editor, who actually has read every word of your paper?

Not I.

Was it to travel? To sell something? To demonstrate to whatever committee currently controls your life that you have spent the last few months “productively”? To build your CV, or make a splash in the thrilling field of [your field here]? To get your next job?

If you wanted to inform us, why didn’t you just tell us? All of us. There is email. There are blogs, available for free. Tell us.

Have you considered that you are transforming the library (possibly, but rarely, libraries) where the scarce physical copies of your work will be stored into mere County Courthouses, where birth and death records are maintained in perpetuity for legal reasons and the occasional amateur genealogist?

If you wanted to build your field, or tout and expand your particular specialty, why not just tell the people most likely to adopt your innovations? This thing here, it smacks of spam; it says you cannot be bothered to identify colleagues, and instead must rely on random suckers. By telling this to five interested, salient people, I bet you could spread the word in a way that would ensure its dominance.

Or have you not bothered to learn the other influential and receptive people in your own field? Think on that a moment.

If you wanted all along to do something else you’re not telling me… hey, I’m willing to believe and support that. Your paper was a ticket, in that case, or an advertisement. And that modality has a long and thriving publishing history in the sciences and in engineering fields around the world.

This paper then is a piece of instant ephemera, isn’t it? After you’ve traveled, gotten your next job, patented that cool new widget: this is the ticket stub in the public scrapbook, the snapshot they make of you and your one-time boyfriend at the top of the log flume in the amusement park, and offer to sell you at the exit.

Could you maybe stamp that at the top? “I had to write this down so they would give me $175 so I could afford on my wages to travel to some far off place and broaden myself, and maybe have some fun, by meeting others just like me.” “I had to prove to some dude that I could ape his sensibilities.” “I had to get the fifth entry on this scavenger hunt of a resumé.”

Those might be good things to place in the paper itself, maybe between the abstract and the useless keyword list, for the casual reader’s benefit.

Or did you write this with delight? Delight in your work, in your progress, in your field and its implications?

Did you write it to tell me, not in these fucking granite stone steps of words, worn dangerously round by years of passive use by monks through the ages, but in poetry? In your choice of haiku, psalm, pentameter?

So where are you, in this?

Did you write it to efface yourself? To blend in against the throngs of nearly identical agents of abstraction?

Mm hmm. I think you maybe did.

Yeah. That worked.

Otherwise, do this: Sit down now, having written this thing, this scrap, this bone that implies no dinosaur but rather a common cow, and start again. Make me laugh. Make the goddamned hairs stand up on my arms. These are words, which do not exist in a cultural vacuum but instead reach across the ages in links to Plato and Byron and David Foster Wallace, to Tolkien and Darwin and Jesus Christ. To novelists, poets, essayists, preachers, and all manner of communicators of delight.

Where are you, in these words? No, wait—I don’t really care. Where is the delight in these words? Make me see that, and you may follow.

You are not allowed to keep delight to yourself. Moron. This, above all the other things, is the thing the Academy has lied you into misunderstanding, with its delayed gratifications and postponements of your life: Delight, kept secret, always fades to nothing.

You are being trained to disappear.

But I think maybe you, this reader, because you have made it this far, you still have a gleam of curiosity in you, some spark of delight left burning and warming you.

Say it. Invoke the muse we still possess, out here in the world. Say it in too many words (though carefully chosen), be too long (there are no page limits), be wordy, be florid, and above all be engaging.

More people will read your work, given some flavor or some spice or some interest and even one goddamned joke—perhaps even a scrap of that body-filling awe that drew you to this work yourself—than will ever sit squirming in the chair at the conference, or dive deeper than your published abstract.

Otherwise, you and your delight are lost. Look at the marriage and death records in the County Courthouse, and tell me where you see the love, the grief, the joy and pain in them.

Your paper is headed to the courthouse of your scant society even now. I will not see it again.

Make us another one. Build yourself one in which you can live.

This convention of unreadable, distant, self-effacing, four-page, two-column, Times Roman fact is not a bow to “reality”, you know. Reality doesn’t give a damn what you say about it, or how many words or pages you use.

It is, rather, the very mechanism by which your career makes you its prey. The sound of droning-but-succinct academic “prose” is the sound of your soul’s bones being chewed by your Institution.

Those other words, the long-form prose, the writing skills you should have learned in your “breadth” training, when instead somebody made you start focusing on your specialty: those are the only sword you are afforded, with which you might, possibly cut your way free.

Otherwise: you’re institution-poop for sure, child.

Sing, or fade. Sing, or die.

Write better.

Now.

Standard LaTeX equation markup can be used in the comments as well, as long as you wrap things in [latex]...[/latex] block-markup.

• I got one: Sinclair Lewis Arrowsmith
  One of the best earliest realist examinations of the motivations and lifestyle of American academic engineers (including in that fold “doctors”, as they should be, now and in the 1900s), Midwesternism (aka “Babbittism”), and the differences between our stated cultural expectations and the implicit ones we generate by the blind decisions we take in our lives.
• To Reference: Clayton M. Christensen The Innovator’s Dilemma
  Corporations—and by extension institutions of other types, like “medicine” and “the Academy”—obtain the well-deserved reputation as logy, stilted piles of dead wood because of their success, not despite it. Christensen’s observation, cunningly masked as common sense, seems to be that large institutions cannot pursue innovations because their adaptive moves are slower and more expensive for them than for smaller, new institutions. In other words: the bigger (and more successful) they are, the more likely to be replaced without even noticing.
• Meh: Jack E. Graver Counting on Frameworks: Mathematics to Aid the Design of Rigid Structures (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  One of many mathematical “recreations” books I’ve been thumbing lately, as we gear up to build a genetic programming innovation engine that will be able to make “mathematical discoveries”. Graver’s monograph focuses on flexibility/rigidity of two- and three-dimensional frameworks (statics, essentially) and the discrete math and neat little theorems that connect (get it? a pun!) graph theory, linear algebra and engineering design principles. One would want it to be a bit more “popularized”, but it’s of interest as a landmark for the future, at least.
• To Buy: Ross Honsberger More Mathematical Morsels (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  This is more along the lines of what I was looking for: a few dozen very interesting, solvable problems that cross the line from “brain teaser” to “advanced homework”. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not sitting here with a graph pad and a pencil trying to do makework and proofs; I’m using these books to research the way we specify (and mis-specify) complex problems. Mostly plane geometry, number theory and a bit of (simple) probability theory, the Morsels series seems to be problems culled from those Math Olympiads I was never smart enough for, and various amateur math journals. Will buy because there are very few proofs; mathematically rigorous proofs are, to shine some clarifying light on my long-standing opinion, overwhelmingly a waste of the time of both the prover and his reader, since they are merely the algorithmic disguising of initial assumptions by wrapping them in hackneyed ritualized maneuvers that decrease one’s crucial ability to question the original crap you started from.
• To Buy: Victor Klee and Stan Wagon Old and New Unsolved Problems in Plane Geometry and Number Theory (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  As with the previous, a nice pile of small, simply-stated problems, with the added fillip (for me, who Cf. above is interested in building computational affordances in support of project management for abstract problem-solving projects) that they’re mostly unsolved. Well, OK, they were; we have Fermat in here, and some others that will be familiar to folks who follow this kind of stuff. But there is plenty of grist in the mill here for me and my ilk, along the lines of, “How would you specify the goals and constraints of a problem like, ‘Are the digits of the decimal expansion of π devoid of any pattern?’” I like that. That’s what real work is about, since it begs so many other questions about who’s asking, what they really want to know, and why.
• To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Chestnuts from around the World (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  Like the other Honsberger books (all AFAIK from the Dolciani Mathematical Expositions series), full of interesting and useful levers to use when learning evolutionary computing and metaheuristics more generally. “The product of a billion positive integers is a billion. What is the greatest sum these billion numbers might have?” might be something you’d throw a search algorithm at, except then you’re answering more along the lines of “…What’s the largest sum you can find?” And that’s not the question. It’s my hope that by thinking about these problems as they’re stated, technical souls who by brainwashed in their homework and worklives to think of specific examples as something to solve in a one-off way might be pushed to thinking of how one can search for methods. In other words: Parametric models are the crutch of a weak mind.
• To Buy: Louis L. Bucciarelli Engineering Philosophy
  Too short, too little, almost too late, but very very nice. A lovely quick monograph that would serve as an introduction to several problems we’ve been wrestling with lately at “work” (What’s “work”? You’ll see, soon enough…): “Designing, like language, is a social process”, “What engineers don’t know and why they believe it”, and perhaps the most interesting and best jumping-off point for a real monograph of its own: “Learning Engineering.” Don’t get me started on the actual engineering students (and professors, and practitioners) I know, who on the whole tend to think about their own work and what it implies very poorly. Not least because they believe they are concerned only with “the real world”. See? You got me started.
• To Borrow: Arthur T. Benjamin and Jennifer J. Quinn Proofs that Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  As I said before, proofs are not my cup of tea right now. But the mental processes that allow people to specify and design proofs are. So this, being a work about the design patterns of combinatorial proofs that deal with “what is the most…?”, “how quickly does…?” and “how many are…?” kind of questions is in fact more interesting than I first expected. The book starts, as do the other Dolciani books I’ve been browsing, with problems, but does go into a number of interesting work-them-through details that for me might be a shopping list of things to watch out for as we try to explain what evolved problem-solvers are actually doing. For the moment I don’t want a how-to, I want a what-was-that? book, and this might come in useful someday soon in that capacity.
• Meh: Arthur T. Benjamin and Ezra Brown, eds Biscuits of Number Theory (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  Mostly proofs, presented via a wide-ranging set of reprinted short papers.
• To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Delights (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  Another Honsberger collection of quick plane geometry, number theory and lightweight combinatorics. One cutely meta one explores the “shared properties of crank solutions to Fermat’s last theorem”.
• To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Gems III (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions, No.9)
  As above, with a nice section on cryptography and number theory that would open up a lovely pile of problems for genetic programming to be used on.
• To Admire: Stewart Coffin Geometric Puzzle Design
  You know those little wooden polyhedra things, where there are a bunch of sticks that interlock, and your goal is to slide and twist and poof they all fall apart, then your real goal of putting them all back together starts? So this is about how to make those, and more interestingly the design patterns you see: sliding blocks, coordinated motion, misleading similarities, ways of using and abusing symmetries, all the empty space (or complicated mechanism) hidden away on the inside. Very cool.
• To Buy: Ross Honsberger Mathematical Diamonds (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  Yeah, well, you get the picture by now: nice. Why are these books so hard to find? Why aren’t they in more libraries?
• To Reference: Michael O’Neill and Conor Ryan Grammatical Evolution: Evolutionary Automatic Programming in an Arbitrary Language (Genetic Programming)
  I know Conor from years back (Jesus, I’m old: back when he was doing this work, for example), and Grammatical Evolution (GE) actually features in a small way in the project I’ve been working on for more than a year. So while I personally don’t need to own this, it was a worthwhile read and if you’re interested in a different way (not stupid old S-expression GP) for evolutionary methods to be used to evolve complex structures like algorithms, proofs, classifiers, trading agents, or whatever, you should consider this book a good intro… if a wee bit outdated. Because, you know, life moves on, and a lot of the stuff this particular book has in it is old hat. In any case, more people ought to know about Grammatical Evolution; it’d do them good to understand there’s more that one way to solve the problem.

  And if you’re a computer kind of person interested in GE: Go have a look at Pavel Suchmann’s GERET system. I like it. Nice, clean code.

• To Admire: Conor Ryan Automatic Re-engineering of Software Using Genetic Programming (GENETIC PROGRAMMING Volume 2)
  I said I knew Conor since way back; he was working on this thesis when I was working on mine at Penn. (Spoiler: he got his degree, unlike me.) Thank you, Conor, for both the size and utility of the chapter entitled “Practical Considerations”: a landmark notion in GP, now and then.
• To Buy: Anthony Brabazon and Michael O’Neill Biologically Inspired Algorithms for Financial Modelling (Natural Computing Series)
  Everybody who ever learned about metaheuristics (even before they earned that st00pid name) said, “Hey! This would be a great way to play the stock market!” A long time ago, Barbara and I were at a computational finance conference, watching the academics talk, and after a couple of days I observed, “You only ever hear these people talk once: either their work is dumb, and we stop inviting them, or their work is smart, and they stop accepting our invitations.” Brabazon and O’Neill have done something dramatically unexpected: written clearly and succinctly about how to build working trading and financial management systems. Throw all your other Springer books on Amazon; this one, if you’re interested in this stuff, is the real deal. Also: more Grammatical Evolution. Now you get the trend?
• Meh: Dan Kalman Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomia and Related Realms (Dolciani Mathematical Expositions)
  Somehow not quite the same stuff as Honsberger’s. I think my reaction is not because the subject matter is different (though it is, being concerned mostly with roots and structure of polynomial equations and stuff), but rather that it’s kind of pedagogically heavy-handed. Like a graduate seminar text or something. Not for beginners, not for amateurs even, in my opinion: more of a focused, progressive advanced training session.

That would be today.

I don’t have a boss. Most of the people I work with don’t have bosses. We don’t even feel the need to say we’re “our own bosses” without being ironic.

It is not your boss’s fault she is your boss. The role is not the person. I’m tempted to appropriate this thing from the useless Chamber of Commerce and make today the day we relieve bosses of their onerous and burdensome task of projecting an unwarranted air of authority.

They are still, after all, chained to that rock.

Go do it now. I’ll wait.

I mention this because the Not An Employee blog [offline for the moment] was recently discovered to have been compromised. We’re still doing surgery on the blog itself, since there seems to be a variant of the exploit floating around that we’re trying to identify and contain.

Having spent much of the weekend reading through accounts of the exploit’s signs and symptoms, what we find in this case seems to be be unique. Or at least unrecorded elsewhere:

1. Three files present in the WordPress blog folder’s root that we didn’t put there:
   1. css.txt, which is base-64 encoded
   2. docbook.txt, also base-64 encoded
   3. A file called Usage, which looks like a wget logfile that culminates in a successful download of docbook.txt from http://mdasla.org/help/css/
2. No extra javascript or URLs were found in any of the other files in the install
3. We’re still checking the database to see if anything was touched there

I haven’t seen this one before. The current wave of WordPress exploits seem to involve URL modifications. Any insights? Any more information needed?

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.

THE WISDOM OF FUN: HARNESSING GAMES & PLAY FOR USEFUL WORK

Humans are habitual problem-solvers, so obsessed with puzzles and patterns that for millennia we’ve posed riddles and created games to fill our “idle time.” But these obsessive problem-solving habits are traditionally seen as a distraction from the “real work” of business, scholarship and public policy.

That is no longer true… if it ever was.

This is the first of a series of three open-format workshops scheduled for 2009 & 2010, where we’ll gather to explore the new ways game play is becoming “useful” work—useful for people and institutions.

On September 19, 2009 please join us for an open-format meeting in which the attendees set the schedule and specific focus for each session. In this first of three workshops, we hope to discuss

• immersive economic games and MMORPGs with developing social norms and virtual economies larger in actual value than some real nations;
• serious games designed to use humans’ innate skills to support search and optimization;
• prediction markets and related collective intelligence systems that harness the wisdom of crowds for robust business decision, forecasting and policy-making;
• crowdsourcing systems that divide up otherwise insurmountable complex problems so that thousands of distributed human solvers can incrementally attack them;
• agent-based simulations used to understand emergent behavior, and game-inspired classical artificial intelligence systems for exploring decision-making and analytics;
• changes in the business and technology of game design within the entertainment industry;
• Second Life and similar game-like virtual platforms, and the social worlds developing there, in which real institutions are struggling to discover their role.

…

Full information is available at the EventBrite registration site. Please consider passing it along or joining in if you’re able.

In case some prejudice seems to be creeping in, I want immediately to clarify something important: these are nice folks as a rule. Admittedly many of them don’t seem to know what to make of “people like us”, and their responses to chats and conversations vary from dismissiveness to a kind of wishful yearning that they could have “my” lifestyle. But on the whole they’re doing what they perceive as their best to improve the world by whatever criteria they feel are most crucial.

But if I wanted a bit more hyperbolic effect, I might call these nice folks the remnant of the traditional business community. They may not feel so good about that, though I don’t mean them harm by imposing the modifier.

I admit though: I have, through these dozens of conversations and interviews, tried to convey that “people like us” often see them as a remnant, when we consider them at all.

Beyond a confirmation of the inherent niceness of people, and their critical diversity of toolkits, what have I learned with this two-year project? I’m making some notes.

Ubiquitous Overextension

As a rule these folks seem to schedule their time poorly. They’re always in a hurry, or late, or interrupting a conversation to take a call. They prefer to hold public meetings and events during the wee hours of the morning, or after work. They dilute even their nominally entertaining outings with one another (typically golf, of all things) with business concerns: “networking” or speeches or award-giving rituals.

I suspect that in part these habits are a mix of signaling and territorial behaviors, part the echoes of constraining sociotechnical infrastructure, and the habituation to the Received Clock.

Signaling is what you might expect, if you know some of “us” and some of the remnant.

“Somebody like me” signals I have the luxury of meeting you for two hours in the middle of the afternoon to discuss the philosophy of business and the next ten years’ forecast for banking and redevelopment in the state. I will meet you right now, if you like, or I can tweet you or phone you or send you an email or open up a Google Docs shared file for you to edit, right now. Because I can, you should be able to as well.

The signal of the remnant’s early morning meeting, the rushed meeting between other meetings, the truncated half-hour refresher or the hurried chat in the parking lot between events is: There is a hierarchy of demands on my time, and they are numerous. My hands are tied; we can go this far and no farther. Depending on the worldview of the person involved in sending this signal, the implication is either (1) a message about how egalitarian they are, that they have two dozen people from all walks of life to deal with, and that each gets their fair share, or (2) that you only rate this much time based on your relative importance in the scheme of things.

Both groups are saying something, in the way they set their time up, about their expectations for the other party. But those expectations are different for “us” and for institutional players.

The sociotechnical constraints seem to stem from these different senses of “institution”, as well.

I know (more or less) where everybody with whom I am concerned is, right now. Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, the phone (and SMS), email and a variety of tagged social media sites that work on a longer timescale keep my network in a kind of dynamic informative tension, like a spiderweb I suppose—though one that overlaps with all my friends’ and colleagues’ own spiderwebs. And when the unexpected comes up, I have these five or seven channels with which to reach somebody, ranging from speaking into the air to make the molecules vibrate in a sensible way, to a phone call to a for: tag on a delicious.com link.

The folks in the remnant, though, they seem blind and deaf somehow. I’ve often wondered if this is an adaptation; I suspect it’s a protective mechanism on a couple of levels. To have to be somewhere to communicate can be a feature or a bug, depending on what you want. To have to see somebody to have a conversation, to fail to record notes and make each meeting revisit old business, to spend so much time physically traveling… these offer up moments for planning, or for self-reflection. They reinforce immediate, physical social cues that are wired into our meat. They can be off-putting to “folks like us”, but if you think about it they can also help establish community boundaries and strengthen internal connections within larger-scale businesses “people like us” don’t interact with.

These cultural differences come up surprisingly often when you’re attuned to them.

I can think of several times I’ve watched “one of us” being told “I’ll have to get back to you once I’ve checked my schedule,” by a member of the remnant. You can see the frustration on both sides: schedules, among us, are made to be changed and adapted to on the spot; they’re agile and flexible and dynamic and our worklives are a matter of tracing an efficient path through the coming days. “Our” success comes from acting as quickly as possible upon the smallest tasks which provide the greatest return. The remnant’s schedules, on the other hand, are planned things, contingent on many stakeholders’ external decisions, written in the slow-flowing glass of institutional infrastructure.

The impatience “one of us” feels when told we’ll hear someday eventually about a scheduled event? That impatience comes from the execution risk that this imposes on our lives: risk that what would otherwise be a linearly separable quantum of social interaction and business value is left as an unknown in our agile schedules, with no clear likelihood of actually occurring at all, disrupting the flow through unaccounted linkages and forcing us to deal with unforeseen repercussions. The confusion one of the remnant feels when asked to make time right now is the disregard for the institution, for the plan, for the process that tries to be “rational” in balancing the utility functions of many stakeholders trying to cooperate on many schedules.

As a consequence, there are deep currents and implications of schedule-setting revolving around the notion of responsibility. “We” are responsible to ourselves, and to our social networks—an often global, contingent and ephemeral cloud of people who are effectively invisible to members of the remnant. The remnant have well-established channels for coordination, and the Company or the other large institutional boundaries make the breadth and bounds of those coordination networks publicly visible.

One correspondent of mine, living as he does at the peak of the local branch of a global remnant organization, often politely tells me how he envies “my flexibility in working whenever I want.” I’ve tried to explain that I work, in the sense of coordinating and driving this jinking spiderweb I ride through life from minute to minute, from the time I open my eyes to the time I fall asleep. But he cannot see that network or the effects I cause in it or I feel from it, and lacking an alternative signal he imagines I am sitting here philosophizing in a life of leisure and guileless meandering dilettantism. And I in turn write him off as a kind of fixed point in town, and expect him to be exactly the same in two weeks, doing exactly the same things as he was yesterday.

And think of planning and project management, across this cultural gap between the remnant and “us”: When I find my occasional correspondent is actually acting, when I discover she has unexpectedly “moved ahead” on a musing project notion we touched on briefly in our meeting three months back, when it comes to light she’s hared off like a juggernaut and done something that seemed like a good idea back then… how often was it the right thing for her to do? Our timescales are so often misaligned, that I can make a dozen iterative changes in a document or program or community design in a weekend, where she has scheduled an appointment with her staff to set up a committee in a few days. A crowd “of us” may have made three versions and discarded them, moved on and established both a position statement and a draft RFP in the time a government or business or church or other remnant institution has coordinated its way into considering what to do.

Just this week a friend in the remnant sent me a link to a “call for contributions” for a meeting to be held several months in the future, which will involve travel and planning and meetings and publishing and setting up bank accounts and LLCs and all kinds of stuff. But in the time between our original conversation and the “call for contributions”… the problem has gone away. It’s solved, at least in my context.

Our different attitudes toward time and action are alternate solutions to the same problems of coordination and planning and risk amelioration in an uncertain world. “We” are no better off for doing five times the work, for hiding or not even knowing who we affect in our ephemeral social networks, than the remnant is for spending all this energy on institutional identity and mid-range planning meetings.

But think for a moment about the remnant—whether you’re a member or not—and consider what happens when a traditional institution says they “need somebody to do social networks for them”, when they explore “modern” methods of customer response management, when they schedule meetings with “us” over golf outings (of all things) or at 7am in the morning, or in a City Hall five miles from “our” workplaces.

When we take the time to do the retrospectives, words like “blindsided” and “unmanageable” and “retrenching” always seem to crop up in internal discussions among the remnant. Terms like “obsolete” and “artificial” and “lame” tend to crop up in whatever appraisals of these remnant projects “we” are willing to record. “Lame” is particularly interesting, if you think about it etymologically: halting, crippled, disabled, slow.

How many times have you seen these clashes in the use and perception of time? In schedules and planning?

Can you see the remnant among the institutions around you? And can you see the ephemeral (nearly invisible) swarming social networks that “we” depend upon instead?

Which is bigger? Which is more important? Which should have the most influence in the coming economic transitions?

How prepared are you, whichever side you live on, for the role the other side must play? What will you do to reconcile these conflicts in habit and perception? How will you schedule your time and make coordinating plans across this cultural divide?

I want you to see a hundred or a thousand of “us” in every town of 100000, with our overlapping social networks and value streams and contingent agile plans thrashing wildly on a minute-by-minute basis on a dozen channels, permeating the infrastructure of the remnant. With little mass individually, but velocity enough to impart considerable momentum. Imagine then the effect on the remnant, these large, many-bodied institutions moving at a lockstep pace, surrounded by these thrashing waves of attention, of goals and actions changing faster than they can perceive them… invisibly in fact.

I see erosion. I see weathering, and seeds growing in cracks in a rock face.

But this doesn’t happen imperceptibly, from the rocky remnant’s point of view. The newspaper can perceive “us”, though it cannot make the connection between individuals and their invisible networks. The Chamber of Commerce can perceive “us” in their declining rolls, and executives there are scrambling to find ways to adapt. No doubt the remnant business development people are starting to falter and wonder what’s broken, though they (and the city) clearly imagine they stand firmly alone in a field. The University, the arts groups, the anchor businesses, the marketing infrastructure: what do they feel?

They are surrounded, invaded, and increasingly driven by things not planned for. Their plans erode and get revised to death, their boundaries and a century’s coordination strategies are made asynchronous and increasingly chaotic.

This is not a threat, but just a natural extension of the metaphor: every chip, every fragment and moment of their unscheduled time and attention, every lost cent of revenue slipping through the cracks in the remnant’s plans, that is a resource one of “us” can pick up, and pass along the networks we have built, that only “we” can see.

Whoever “we” are. I don’t know, myself, past the half-dozen friends I watch and interact with in my immediate social neighborhood. But then I don’t need to know more than that to make my way successfully. None of “us” do.