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I am afraid that the Wikipedia is a classic case of what I’ve come to term “the internet trust anti-patttern”. It goes something like this: A communication/collaboration system is started by self-selecting core group of high-trust technologists (or specialists of some sort). Said system is touted as authority-less, non-hierarchical, etc. But this is not true (see 1). The general population starts using the system. The system nearly breaks under the strain of untrustworthy users. Regulatory controls are instituted to restore order. Sometimes they are automated, sometimes not. If the regulatory controls work, the system survives and is again touted as authority-less, non-hierarchical, etc. But this is not true (see 5). If the regulatory controls don’t work, the system becomes marginalized or dies. Think of Usenet, think of IRC, think of email, think of P2P networks- they’ve all gone through this cycle. Some have survived and other have effectively died. ...

The following, from Jorge Luis Borges, reminds me of some software projects I’ve seen… “.. In that Empire, the Art of Cartography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy, and the Colleges of Cartographers set up a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point by point. Less Addicted to the Study of Cartography, Succeeding Generations understood that this Widespread Map was Useless and not without Impiety they abandoned it to the Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters. In the deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by animals and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of Geography.” ...

Seeing Leigh Dodds wearing a tie. Apparently his children thought it was pretty odd too. Oh, yeah. And having somebody point out in their “Web 2.0” presentation that you haven’t updated your blog in half a year. /Me=shamed.

Abulafia Way back in 1990, when I worked at Brown University, I wrote a hypertext application for the Macintosh called “Abulafia.” (named after the computer in Umberto Eco’s book, Foucault’s Pendulum. Recently I found some old Zip disks onto which I archived my Brown work when I left the university in 1995. I asked a hardware magpie friend of mine if he had a way of reading old 100MB Zip cartridges and he did. Amazingly, the old Zip cartridges were still accessible (thanks Iomega) and even more amazingly, I was able to find an old binary of Abulafia and run it under OS X’s classic emulation mode (thanks Apple). ...

In Part I, I described two graphs that I think help explain much IT dysfunction. I also noted that, typically: People in group A will often talk to and solicit advice from people in group C. (think VC or CEO talking to technical guru) There are relatively few people in group C. (some companies might not have anybody internal in group C- they hire consultants or read expert opinion) Most of the people who actually have to implement and maintain new technologies are in group B. Clearly there are lots of gradations between A & C & B, so I am using the groups as a convenient way to refer to the extremes. In the case of group B, the extreme is people with relatively-solid technical credentials but who are very cynical about technology and are very risk-averse. There are a few things that one often finds with group B: ...