The NOSE

Immanuel Kant meets Flickr and Open Source

The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant had the saying: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." I studied Kant for an entire semester in college and to this day I still only kind of understand what he was talking about. In a nutshell, Kant claimed that knowledge is a synthesis between experience and what we bring to experience. What he meant though by "knowledge", "synthesis", "experience", and even "we" is notoriously obscure. Which brings me to open source. 

Jim Willis posted an interesting comment (with which I agree) on my talk at Harvard's JFK School of Government. At the end of the talk I had suggested formulaically that:

Community = Code + Content

I was trying to make the point that there is a new dynamic which is emerging out of the open source movement. On the one hand, there is open code, which is what we usually mean by open source. Open code is important and vital. On the other hand, we also now have an emerging open content movement led by initiatives such as MIT's OpenCourseWare and the Creative Commons founded by Lawrence Lessig. Taken together they are enabling communities and new forms of association. I mentioned Flickr as an innovative community that rests on code and content, even though in this case neither the code nor content is open.

What makes Flickr dazzling (I am a loyal user) is the way in which they have managed to spring a community into existence based on great software and content contributed by its users.

Here was Jim Willis' comment in his blog:

"The speaker at lunch was Al Essa, CIO at MIT’s Sloan School of Mgmt. He gave an interesting talk on Open Code and Open Content. It was very similar to the talk I’ve been giving at government conferences for a few years now except his focus was more on Open Code/Content in academia. He had a very interesting formula towards the end of his presentation:
Open Code + Open Content = Community.

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way, but it’s an interesting idea. I’d argue that he’s missing a variable there and it should really be:

Open Code + Open Content + Open Services = Community"

I have to say that Willis is right. There is a missing variable and as Willis points out it's "Services". So, going forward I will use the following formula:

Community = Content + Code + Services

Let me also put forward the following hypothesis: the more open the content, the code, and the services, the more vibrant and richer the potential for creating a community. And at the end of the day code, content, and services are just means. What we should all really be going after are open communities, based on curiosity, sharing and mutual respect. Open content, open code, and open services can make it possible.

 

Open Source and Open Content: An MIT Perspective

Here are the slides for a talk I gave recently at Harvard Kennedy School of Government:

Open Source and Open Content: An MIT Perspective

I framed the discussion around the concept of innovation, drawing in particular from MIT's Eric Von Hippel and IBM's Irwing Wladowsky-Berger. In a few days I will update the slide with references and acknowledgments.

Enabling Collaborative Innovation

I have long been an admirer of Irwing Wladowsky-Berger, Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM. Lou Gerstner may get credit for rescuing IBM from its near-death experience in the 1990's, but Wladowsky-Berger was the key player who designed IBM's successful Internet strategy that eventually led to company-wide intiatives such as the embrace of Linux and Open Source. Wladowsky-Berger is now a strong evangelist of grid computing.

In my talk this week at Harvard I plan to begin with this quote (I edited the audio using MP3 Trimmer and incorporated it into Apple Keynote) by Wladowsky-Berger, derived from his keynote at OSBOC 2005 :

"And in the information age, because of the magnitude of the problems that we are tackling and because the tools enable us to bring more people together, probably the most interesting management innovation is the notion of collaboration. And it’s precisely as a means to enable collaborative innovation that we all need to look at open source communities." (emphasis mine)

Here is a guy who gets it. For Wladowsky-Berger the value of open source is not in the "source code". It's a true management innovation that enables a new form of collaboration for solving highly complex problems.

Management books and Business School curriculum still have not caught up, but they will. (Among the notable exceptions is Eric Von Hippel at MIT's Sloan School of Management. I am interested in learning if there are others.)

Wladawsky-Berger's talk ("The Future of IT in an On-Demand World") is available as a Podcast at IT Conversations. It's full of insights and worth listening to in its entirety.

The Success of Open Source

I am only mid-way through Steven Weber's The Success of Open Source but am sufficiently impressed to recommend it as THE book on open source.

As much I admire Eric Raymond's polemical Cathedral and the Bazaar, Weber's is by far the most sophisticated and multi-dimensional book (history, technology, business, culture) on open source available.

If you have time to read only one book on on open source, this is the one.

Goodbye to Venture Capital

Howard Anderson, big time venture capitalist and William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management, is saying good-bye to the industry. (Anderson is Senior Managing Director of the Cambridge-based YankeeTek Ventures. Its home page is quite amusing in the light of Anderson's announcement. It deserves an award for simplicity and directness.)

His article in Technology Review provides a very interesting insight into the technology sector, market prospects , and how venture capitalists think. Here's a taste:

 

Japanese Garden, Portland

"VCs actually like cyclical markets; we can buy in cheaply and wait for exuberance to bail us out. Traditionally, we knew that if we picked the right sector we could make 10 times our money. In fact, we knew if we picked the best two or three companies in that sector, we could make 50 times our money--but you get my point. But those days are, regrettably, over. Here's why: it takes about $30 million to get a startup software company to break even--and even great software companies rarely grow more than 100 percent a year. In irrational times, a software company with $30 million in sales would have been worth $180 million, or 600 percent of a VC's investment. Which is good, but not great. Unfortunately, in rational times, the company would be worth $47 million to the investors, or only 157 percent of their investment. But that's over five years! Per year, it's a return of only 11 percent--and that's for a winner. Remember: in venture funds, only 20 percent of investments are winners. Forty percent are in the middle, 20 percent are losers, and another 20 percent are write-offs."