Just found out from Keith Hopper about Fundable.org. Also about RepRap, which Chris DiBona says is “China on your desktop”. And Boston FabLab, which just looks totally cool.
Wanted to get those down before I lost track.
Author: Doc Searls (page 38 of 40)
Thanks to the good folks putting on the 2nd European Identity Conference, also known (and now tagged) as EIC2008, we have VRM2008 starting in advance of it at the same location in Munich.
VRM2008 will take place on 21-22 April (all day Monday, and up until lunch at 1300 on Tuesday). EIC2008 will follow for the rest of 22 April and on through Friday, 25 April.
We also learned recently that ProjectVRM is one of three finalists for a Special Award to be given at the European Identity Award Ceremony on the evening of 22 April. I’ll be there for all of it. This includes a talk titled What Happens When the Users are Really In Charge, at 1030 on Wednesday 23 April. An interview with Dr. Christian Stöcker, SPIEGEL Online, will follow.
Here’s the deal. Anybody registering for VRM2008 will receive:
- a conference pass for VRM2008 (21-22 April)
- all EIC keynotes on 22nd April
- the evening event on 22nd April with buffet dinner, Bavarian beer and a great live band
- the Internet Scale Identity track sessions on 23rd April, which include the talk and interview listed above.
The event location, Forum am Deutschen Museum, is in the center of Munich.
Free registration is here.
A point is reached, in the spread of an original idea, when its source realizes that others can make the case for the idea at least as well — if not better — than he or she can.
That point came for me with VRM a while ago, from a number of the sources I just added to the blogroll there on the right. But it was especially gratifying to read What Comes After CRM, from Jay Deragon, about whom I’m sorry I wasn’t clued into sooner than the last few weeks, when I started catching up on his writing, that of Carter Smith, and other colleagues of theirs. In fact, while making their improving acquaintance, I wrote the forward to their book, The Emergence of the Relationship Economy.
Lots of grist for our mills there.
In my view, the problem Jon has raised for discussion is one of a great many that have surfaced because institutions “elided” users from business interactions. One of the main reasons for this is that institutions had computers long before it could be assumed that individuals did.
It will take a while for our society to rebalance – and even invert some paradigms – given the fact that we as individuals are now computerized too.
This is the core of VRM, which is about equipping individuals with tools of independence and engagement.
It is, indeed, paradigm inversion.
So Gam Dias is talking here at IIW about how he creates and manages his own interactions with the marketing mechanisms in the world. Can’t detail it here, but it’s interesting stuff, and I want to get it down in a blog, much as he does in his own blog.
Nooked is also up on the screen. Cool angle on the same thing.
So I’m answering an inquiry from a student doing a paper on DRM. While doing that, I’m wondering if VRM is the cure for DRM. Meaning, it does away with the need by replacing one-way coercion with two-way relationship. Or maybe three-way if a trust assurance party is also involved. Need to think about that.
From my reply:
The idea is to equip customers with tools of both independence and engagement. That is, independence from sellers and better ways of engaging with sellers.
For copyrighted works, VRM could involve agreements made on an individual basis — ones that could involve actual relationships between copyright holders and their customers. For example, if I buy an open (non-DRM’d) copy of an album by Mike Marshall (my favorite mandolin player), it might involve letting him know who I am, the fact that I like his work, a commitment not to duplicate it beyond fair uses, and the option to do any number of things, including re-distributing it for pay that would get us both a slice of the take. The options are wide open. What matters is that there would means for a real reslationship based on mutual interest, trust and control.
What think ya’ll?
Bibliography:
- http://craphound.com/hpdrm.txt
- http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
- http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wir.html
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/04/lightspeed
- http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/004454.html
- http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673
- http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115047057428882434-1V_FEK_CJelMfytdST8APRW7cZw_20060720.htmlh
- ttp://www.engadget.com/2004/09/27/your-best-questions-for-wendy-seltzer-of-the-electronic/
- http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/01/30/lessig.html
No time to make those links “blue” right now. Will get to it when I’m off the bus and have time later.
I just learned by the Ajatus Manifesto that sixty-five percent of all CRM systems fail. Ajatus blames companies rushing to implement CRM. I’m sure that’s true. But I also think it’s possible that CRM itself is flawed by the closed and silo’d nature of the “relationships” involved. As a customer I can only relate to company CRM systems on the companies’ terms. Not on ones that I provide as well — for the good of us both. In other words, the base problem is that the lack of customer independence as a base condition for the relationship in the first place.
But I see here that Ajatus itself is a new CRM system for individual humans. Specifically,
Ajatus is a revolutionary CRM that runs as a local Ajax web application on your own computer. It uses the CouchDb object database for data storage and enjoys a wide range of plug-in and replication possibilities. With Ajatus you can keep track of your
- Notes
- Contacts
- Appointments
- Hour reports
…and as Ajatus is very extensible…
So it’s personal. That’s interesting.
It ‘s also an open source project, which is cool. Here’s more from the prime author, Henri Bergius:
What makes Ajatus so special is the approach we’re taking with it. Having with OpenPsa found the traditional, hierarchical CRM approach unworkable we wanted to solve the problem in a different way:
- Local, rich AJAX client everybody can run on their laptop or internet tablet
- Replication to allow sharing data with partners, customers and the employer
- Simple base data types (note, event, contact, …) that users can customize and extend
- Possibility to build integration tools and plug-ins in almost any language (with CouchDb’s restful JSON interface)
- Speed
To help us stay on the right path we even wrote an Ajatus Manifesto to guide ourselves.
Currently the software already runs and does pretty much all the basic things needed. Once we get it into state where we can dogfood it (in interoperation with the company OpenPsa) we will make the first release. Until then, stay tuned, check the Git repository and join the talk!
Perhaps Hernri would be interested in joining ours as well.
Meanwhile, thanks to Zak Greant for pointing out the Ajatus Manifesto.
Work to Be Done is my August 2007 Linux For Suits column in Linux Journal. In it I leverage the wisdom of Willard McCarty —
Particularly since the advent of the Web, our attention and energy have been involved with the exponential growth of digitization. The benefits for scholarship here are unarguably great. But as ever larger amounts of searchable and otherwise computable material become available, we don’t simply have more evidence for this or that business as usual. We have massively greater ecological diversity to take account of, and so can expect inherited ways of construing reality and of working, alone and with each other, to need basic renovation. Here is work to be done. It’s not a matter of breaking down disciplinary boundaries-the more we concentrate on breaking these down, the more they are needed for the breaking down. Rather the point is the reconfiguration of disciplinarity. From computing’s prospect at least, the feudal metaphor of turf and the medieval tree of knowledge in its formal garden of learning make no sense. We need other metaphors. Here is work to be done.
… into the challenge of VRM, where approximately 100% of What We Need To Do remains to be done.
…deciding to expose any data to a potential vendor is a customer choice, not a marketers right. — Echovar on Why marketing is broken.
Work to be done is my August, 2007 Linux For Suits column in Linux Journal. It lays out the almost zero-based challenge of making VRM tools happen. We need code here, and we don’t have it yet. Not any we’d call primarily VRM, anyway. There are tools that may be VRM-like, or do some VRM work. But none yet that were invented for the single-minded purpose of equipping individuals with tools that help them build real and productive relationships with vendors.
That remains the challenge here. We need code.
That’s what I’d like to see us put on the front burner for VRM sessions at the next IIW (iiw2007b), scheduled for December 3-5 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.
These workshops have been, without exception, the most productive I’ve ever seen. Stuff happens there. Parties that would be natural enemies in other venues scribble on whiteboards and pound on laptops, working things out.
Look forward to seeing you there.
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