About
ProjectVRM is a development and research project hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and is conceived as the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Management, the $48 billion business by which companies attempt to relate to customers. The project has two purposes:
- To encourage the development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations — especially in commercial marketplaces.
- To encourage and conduct research on VRM-related theories, usage of VRM tools, and effects as adoption of VRM tools takes place.
The project was created by Doc Searls when he became a fellow at the Center in 2006*. Since then, the VRM community has grown to include many development projects, companies, allied associations and individuals, in addition to ProjectVRM itself. The community’s work is outlined in the project wiki, and discussed on its mailing list (with over 500 members), in the blog portion of this site, and in workshops and other events, most notably at IIW: the Internet Identity Workshop, a twice-yearly unconference at the Computer History Museum. (Doc has co-organized IIW since it began in 2005.)
Doc sees VRM as “a way to fulfill one of the promises of The Cluetrain Manifiesto” — the widely-cited website and book, both written in 1999 by Doc and three other authors (one of whom is David Weinberger, also of the Berkman Klein Center). That promise was embodied in this statement, written by Christopher Locke:
Implicit in that “one clue” is a thesis: that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves and to the marketplace. ProjectVRM knows that customer reach will only exceed vendor grasp when customers acquire tools for the job, and prove that thesis true. Encouraging the development of those tools has been ProjectVRM’s primary work since the project began.
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*Doc has been an alumnus fellow since 2010. He also continues to direct ProjectVRM, and co-founded Customer Commons, a spin-off of ProjectVRM, in 2012. He also serves on Customer Commons’ board.
The photo at the top of the blog was taken in July 2011 at the Rialto mercado in Venice, one of the oldest and most famous markets in the world. It is the one where Marco Polo worked, and the setting for Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.
Also, spam filtration is something of a fail on this blog until we have things worked out. There shouldn’t be comments here anyway, since it is a purely informational page. So, until we have that fixed, please bear with us. And, if you wish, dig what unfiltered spam looks like. It’s almost interesting. — Doc
February 23, 2016 at 6:23 am
Hi there, since almost 2 years I now follow the VRM Project. In my oppinion it is a great approach to free individuals from massive crm analytics an personal ad targeting.
Within the last two year I could develop an business idea to support the vrm thinking. We are called digitando and settled in Cologne(Germany) where currently Internet Society seems to wake up especially when it is about privacy. Probably Edward Snowden initiated an massive wake-up call, world-wide.
However, digitando aims to be the VRM-Tool for online-shoppers. By first step we focus on massive mail-traffic that is generated due to online shoppers give their mail-adress by contact form to vendors. Lots of status-mails like order confirmation, shipping message or invoice are the result. Further, Newsletters, Newsletters and Newsletters.
digitando offers the so called “diE-Mail” to our users so that they use that one for online-Shopping. Therefore all mail traffic goes through our system and containing data will be extracted and compressed shown in individual user dashboard.
We see this step as first move to strengthen online shoppers in their vendor management…
Currently we have launched our first live demo (sry, only german until now) on digitando.de and are now working on user growth.
I would strongly appreciate to be listed on the harvard vrm project page; unfortunately it was not possible to edit the page although I am registered.
Best wishes from germany,
hope to hear from you,
Florian Götz
http://www.digitando.de
June 10, 2016 at 11:30 am
Why doesn’t this “about page” simply expand the apparent acronym “VRM”? What does that mean?
September 11, 2016 at 8:26 pm
I’m with Brian, came here to find out what this project is and I still don’t know.
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Nice article. Although I do not totally understand the motive of Project VRM. I hope details about this project will be shared.
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