The Change (updated)

Remember the Past, Think Ahead, Act Now!

Even after decades, on the day of June 4th and September 11th each year, images of Tank-Man in 1989 and New York Firefighters in 2001 still refresh my mind again and again because the person or the people in the pictures demonstrated their admirable courage to change the situation under extremely tough conditions at particular historical moments.

This year, on 9/11, what I did specially was to sort through quite a few questions, note down my pursuit of answers in my English that seemingly need continuous improvement. Therefore, it looks more like an article in constant editing state and a work in progress towards something more interesting.

Questions

Have you ever noticed that something big has been changing silently in past decade? I mean, society-wise and business-wise. Have you been trying to redefine or to involve in any new type of transaction in terms of social business? Have you seen some factors really matters now more than ever than before? Let me start with the first one.

Courage

Through mass-media, it is usually easy for us to see courage well-demonstrated at some big historical event like what's mentioned above. In comparison, the "peace-time" courage I put down below was not demonstrated in the "big-event" way, so it may be not as apparent as the above-mentioned two.

The Courage to Think Ahead: Have you ever read Vannevar Bush's As We May Think published on Atlantic Monthly July 1945 issue. Yes. A man's thinking ahead with his unique position can change history of science, technology and ultimately the whole society though it may take decades.

The Courage to Act: Have you ever read this 1996 paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine written by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page as students of Computer Science Department, Stanford University who later on founded a company called Google in 1998 using the same name of the school project. There would never be an easy case to translate a paper into a business. So, what would be the biggest gap? Would you agree to me that the first bridge to this big gap was the courage to act to realize their dream to download all web pages over the world to one place to index, to analyze to do whatever computing that is needed? That is truly a unqiue fear response to counting the very limited computing resources(network bandwidth, storage, computing power etc) they had at hand as students.

"Peace-time" Courage never comes from air. Instead, it usually comes from discerning hearts. Take early Google as example, their unique search result relevance came from some simple factors they observed and counted in their system design to set them apart from other search engine peers. Your search keywords are matched better because they considered the factors of anchor text(text over the hyperlink), font of the word when indexing the HTML content crawled. Secondly, they "devised" the calculable "weight" to each web page based on how many other web pages point to it and other page's weight (in their term "Rank"). Sounds familiar? Isn't this similar to SCI(Science Citation Index) familiar to everyone in the academia? Yes, it may be just another evidence of the scripture: "there is nothing new under the sun".

Their early success is demystified? Let's move on. Courage can enable further success on top of something initiators do not fully realized when they act. I am not sure if the two young students then realized a fundamental flaw or "hole" of World-Wide-Web invented initially by Tim Berners-Lee: our web-page link is one-way. A linked web page does not know which pages link to it. However, when a search engine company tries to put all web pages in one place to index, to calculate their "ranks" based on how they are linked each other, to some degree, these efforts offset the negative impact of this design flaw.

Cognitive Surplus

It is all about how we leverage "a surfeit of intellect, energy, and time- the Cognitive Surplus" called by Clay Shirky, owned by each of us.

"As Shirky points out, Wikipedia was built out of roughly 1 percent of the man-hours that Americans spend watching TV every year. Wikipedia and other current products of cognitive surplus are only the iceberg's tip. Shirky shows how society and our daily lives will be improved dramatically as we learn to exploit our goodwill and free time like never before."

It is the most encouraging and impacting phenomenon in last decades after Dotcom Crash that more and more people start spending their cognitive surplus to initiate, to collaborate on something meaningful to the society and industry on a large scale in a completely open, information-symmetric way, without direct monetary objective.

Social Business Transaction

Let's call this type of collaboration Social Business Transaction. It starts with "Social", i.e. sharing an initial thought or an initial seeding work over social content/communication/networking platform or social coding platform with objective to seek potential collaborators who have the similar interest and may contribute to the same direction over the same platform. It is still classified as a special type of "Business Transaction" because there is indirect or potential economic gain for contributors whose names are associated with the work once this transaction completes, i.e. the work produced is accepted, widely used by society and or industry. Social recognition or reputation capital can be easily translated into a sort of economic interests in a particular socio-economic context. Of course, like other types of transaction, it is not immune to risks, i.e. a transaction could fail when works produced are not accepted by industry and society, then goes nowhere, cognitive surplus is spent with zero return except lessons learned. Actually, this is the case for majority of open-source projects with failure rate similar to the business startup.

Despite of tbe above-mentioned similarities, differences are apparent, compared with conventional business transaction based on trading-secret, information asymmetry, patent protection and of course direct commercial profit objective clearly set. Essentially, the different approach on treating information associated with the transactional process set them apart.

Why does Social Business Transaction reflect a light of noble human spirit? Because information is the catalyst for mobilizing social production resources. Cost-efficiently mobilizing resources to maximize productivity and social benefits has been dreams generation by generation. From this perspective, information is more important and powerful than the product built on top of information to an individual who has demand on the product and is keen to join the social production at the same time. Social Business Transaction starts with an open invitation to people who are keen to contribute and gain indirectly from their contribution. The complete transaction not only ends with a successful product accepted by industries or society, but also an expanded pool of contributors and more cognitive surplus to generate new level of Social Business Transaction. The open invitation is also a complete trust to invitee who is trusted neither to abuse the information nor to violate the license agreement such as GPL, Creative Commons License. The explicit one is to continue Information Symmetry (GNU GPL like). The implicit one is to avoid gaining competitive advantage over the information against the society including the inviter, i.e. the information originator, social business transaction initiator.

(As a side-note on 9/11, in contrast, thinking about terrorist, we should see their essential strategy is just about playing information asymmetry against our society, gaining their "competitive advantage" against us over a lot of our information open to everyone.)

Power of Sharing the Best

Conventional wisdom tends to teach us like this: "Keep the Best, Share the Rest." Although there are spiritual teaching and practices against it in the context of love, kinship or Christianity, such conventional wisdom has been dominating people's thinking pattern in terms of sharing what they own when participating in economy in past thousands of years. It is based on one assumption: keeping the best information or materials owned by you can help you gain advantage during competition.

In fact, more and more stories of success occurred in most recent decade proved that this assumption no longer hold true. So what is the rationale behind this big change?

Here is my pursuit of the answer. Let's start with two facts. First, implementation of any idea or design in today's industries generally requires more collective efforts in order to tackle the complexity and scalability issue. Second, social collaboration platform enabled by modern communication and content management technologies shorten the concept-to-revenue turnaround time drastically. Therefore, comparing incentive of hoarding the best with sharing the best becomes a matter of new computation based on two path. One is hoarding the best idea you have, patent it if patentable or keep it as trading secret as long as possible. The bottom line of this path is to drive the implementation on your own and to avoid sharing unless you have to share. The other is to share your best idea from the first beginning. Best idea can attract people easily and trigger a formation of collaboration circle organically. This collaboration circle or say shadow network drives the further development of the idea or concept until its materialization in relatively shorter time period.

Now the computation problem is transformed into the following calculation: risk-wise, higher risk of gaining nothing because of losing time-race for materialization apparently versus lower risk of gaining something through collaboration circle. Now as you can see, the decision to abandon the conventional wisdom should not be a hard decision. Plus, with group intelligence, initial best idea is easier to be raised to the new level of abstraction leading to new level of success, or further developed with extensions resulting in additional benefits.

Sharing the best is a liberation, liberating yourself from trying to determine the fate of a great idea you have on your own, from overworking to do everything on your own.

New Source of Quality

When we talk about quality, this term is usually associated with "control". Yes, process-control seems to be an unavoidable classical theme in terms of quality management. So what is the change and what is the new source of quality? A simple answer is aggregatable attention and caring efforts over an open platform.

When there are enough people who care about something of their interest, quality can come from a social collaboration platform to allow people to participate in real-time collaboration directly with more open and less control design paradigm.

In Clay Shirky's another book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, he had an in-depth analysis on quality of Wikipedia.

Since Wikipedia is completely open to editing by everyone, it is under risk of vandalism. However, you don't see this Wiki-page about New York is messed up, because there are enough New Yorkers or New York fans caring about city image of New York, visiting there frequently, reporting or correcting vandalized content in almost a real-time manner (indicated online-research data). In addition, the Wiki-platform has the built-in system feature to do versioning restoration easily.

Yes. Instantaneous division of labor empowered by digital collaboration platform with open-design paradigm leads to higher quality! This provides another perspective for us to interpret why millions of web sites run on Apache, Linux in past decades and why Facebook relies on Hadoop to deal with petabyte data, to empower latest feature of real-time messaging and analytics.

Months ago, a pastor told me this: he found that some Wiki content related under his research topic is surprisingly of high quality, with neutral point of view. My explanation on this phenomenon: there are always religious extremists who have been constantly posting their extremist view, but there are always more people holding neutral point of view. They are all passionate to spend their “cognitive surplus” to post their content over wiki to influence readers. Guess who will win ultimately and whose content will be more likely to stay there longer? Obviously, the population of each side is the key factor to determine which side wins.

Closing Thoughts

I do initialize and post a Social Business Transaction to this "circle" as an invitation to explore something new.

"You can observe a lot just by watching." (Yogi Berra). What if we participate in it together?


Think Ahead, Act Now!

Let's do it with courage, design and maybe a plan that's never going to be complete ... ...