For me, one of the 2008’s most important (but least remarked-upon) ideas was spelled out in this post which details how Ward Cunningham implemented Brian Marick’s notion of Visible Workings. The idea, briefly, is that businesses can wear (non-confidential aspects of) their business logic on their sleeves, observable to all.
In a year of devastating consequences ensuing from the lack of transparency in business, you’d think Ward and Brian would be celebrated for this work. No such luck. Partly, I’m sure, because their insights flow from the realm of software development and software testing, and don’t generalize in an obvious way.
It struck me this morning that yesterday’s item on using del.icio.us to manage trusted feeds may help to broaden the appeal of the idea.
In that item I mainly talked about the logistical benefits of the approach. You write less code, and you get to leverage existing infrastructure for data management, web UI, collaboration, and syndicated alerts. That’s all good. But there’s also a transparency benefit which I neglected to point out.
At this moment, for example, del.icio.us/elmcity is a snapshot of the feeds and contributors known to, and classified by, the live version of my service at elmcity.info/events. That version uses private lists of trusted feeds, and of new and trusted contributors. I haven’t yet cut over to the newly-rewritten Azure version, but when I do, it will use these public lists instead.
The del.icio.us/elmcity snapshot reports that there are 41 Eventful contributors of which 37 are trusted and 4 are new.
Why are the four new contributors still sitting in the holding tank? One I mentioned yesterday. jheslin created a venue, but no events. I plan to delete that contributor and wait to see if he or she shows up again with actual event contributions.
That leaves TallWilly, blahblah25, and michellelewis. Why are they still sitting in the holding tank? Here’s the crucial point: I’m not sure. I know that I reviewed them when they showed up, and applied a policy. If it were written down, which until now it hasn’t been, it would use language like “legitimate” and “substantive” to define the kinds of contributions that move a new contributor into the trusted bucket. But I can’t actually say how I applied that policy in these cases.
So let’s investigate. First, TallWilly. Clicking through, I find that TallWilly is no longer an Eventful user. Obviously I’ll want to remove him from the new bucket. Implicit rule now stated: Must be an Eventful user.
Second, blahblah25. Clicking through, I find only one event. Seems legit, and so far I haven’t required more evidence than a single legit event, so why didn’t I promote blahblah25? Oh, I see. Jan 4, 1900 12:30 AM isn’t a reasonable start date. Implicit rule now stated: Date must be reasonable.
(Of course there’s more to the story here. blahblah25’s bogus date was either a human error or a software error, or both. Ideally the aggregator, when rejecting a contribution on that basis, would notify the contributor and invite a correction.)
Third, michellelewis. Why didn’t I decide to trust her? Turns out it was just a mistake! Clicking through, I find an entire schedule of concerts, including this one at Fritz Belgian Fries on April 3, 2009. That event, and future events posted by michellelewis, absolutely belong on the calendar.
I only discovered this mistake by reviewing the lists of new and trusted contributors. In the existing version of the system, I’m the only one who can do that. But in the new version, everyone can. More eyeballs, fewer bugs.
Even more interesting, to me, is notion of developing and applying policy-driven business logic in a transparent way. Of course business processes can’t always work that way. But the default, now, is that none do. Sometimes, maybe more often than we imagine, we could flip that default. It would be an interesting experiment to try.
>>I plan to delete that contributor and wait to see if he or she shows up again with actual event contributions.
i imagine that you may have already described the process by which other potential contributors may “show up” but i can’t seem to find it.
could you elaborate a bit on how that process of discovering potential contributors happens? do you rely on google alerts or do you do periodic searchs on known services like eventfull and such?
“do you rely on google alerts or do you do periodic searchs on known services like eventful and such?”
The latter. Every scan of Eventful produces a list of events within a radius around a target location. Every event has an owner. If an owner hasn’t been seen before, that Eventful account goes into the “new contributor” bucket. Monitoring the feed of eventful+new+contributor produces an alert. The feed item’s link points to the events created by that new contributor, so an admin can easily click through, evaluate, and make a decision.