Venessa and Doc,
I am so excited are in agreement about the expansive and empowering nature of project VRM (Virtual Relationship Manager??). I am a vocal proponent of the P2P economy + Occupied! so, for me, this is a kumbaya moment.
Lurkingly,
-Jeff Sterling
On Oct 12, 2011, at 9:27 AM, Doc Searls wrote: I'm making this a new thread because I think the cybertwin is a great idea.
I respond to other stuff along the way, below. The cybertwin stuff is near the bottom.
On Oct 12, 2011, at 8:22 AM, Venessa Miemis wrote: comments below.
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:34 PM, Doc Searls <
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thanks doc. i read through all the links you provided. i guess my mental block with the term VRM, as an everyday person, is that it's just inaccessible. i don't know what a vendor is or why i need to manage that relationship.
VRM is just a label. Like ATM. You don't deal with a teller at an ATM machine. But Automated Teller Machine is what it's formally called. The world is full of three-letter initialisms that are dull but in common use.
In any case, I'm forking this topic off to another thread, where we can deal with it as a single thing.
i'm a human being with limited time, attention and resources, and i want to have as much quality information as possible in order to make choices that are in alignment with my needs, desires and values, and i want to have the agency in order to make those choices.
if the point of calling that 'VRM' is so the business world has something to latch onto... i guess i get that.... except that what i hear from this list is that the tools for VRM will NOT be manifested by the enterprise, so why bother?
We call it VRM because that worked in conversation and caught on where other terms did not. In a way it was tested, and proven. Maybe the wrong tests and proofs, but we needed to proceed (in September 2006), so we did.
wouldn't it make more sense to frame it in language that conveys to the individual an understanding of how they could behave in a marketplace and have their needs fulfilled?
Sure. Again, let's pick that up in the other thread. when i imagine the future of business and work and commerce and collaboration, i see a much more robust set of attributes that we can expressly state about ourselves, our intentions, and our aspirations. i want to make it very clear what i care about, what i value in the world, and what it takes to earn my trust. i want others to know what my strengths are so that i can be brought in to exciting projects and contribute the skills and resources i have at my disposal in order to make something better in the world. and every time i do that, i want it to be accounted for in some way so that the trust others have in me and the _expression_ of my reputation is actually backed by the integrity of my words and actions. (not just earning klout or winning a popularity contest of RTs.)
Right. Me too.
when i'm able to make a choice that is actually in alignment with my values, i WILL tell others about it, because i'm proud of it and it feels empowering. (instead of what currently happens, where i'd *like* to make a certain kind of decision, but it's simply not practical, affordable, or possible, so i have to compromise, to my own detriment.) this will not only apply to my relationships with "vendors," but with everyone. i see a lot more of my personal activity happening around peer-to-peer, around self-organizing swarms, around new and different complex organizational arrangements.... so i guess in that sense every agent in the system becomes a potential 'vendor,' which to my mind makes the term irrelevant.
This is an important point, and it leads in a number of directions.
Before we go down those, I want to say that VRM is about equipping individuals. This should enable, rather than exclude, all kinds of social activity. All we're doing is drawing a circle around the individual, and saying "We're working on stuff that goes here." Doesn't mean stuff shouldn't go elsewhere, or that connections can't happen. In fact, VRM and its tools presume a fully connected environment. The connections matter. The forms of engagement matter. What we don't want is to assume that all that matters is what's social, or that the personal is subordinated to the social. Since social is still hot stuff right now, that tends to be a default assumption, and one we like to resist.
Back to peer-to-peer. This is key, because there are some parallel observations, concerns and changes going on that need to be visited.
One is that individual connections between people will increasingly transcend those between people and corporations, or governments, or any other organization. This is what the Net has enabled, and will further enable as VRM tools come into use by individuals making meaningful connections to other individuals. The timing is right, because we're on the verge of de-institutionalizing many things, starting with the financial system, and perhaps even governent. That's the real agenda, IMHO, of the #OWS movement.
The last two days I got some time with JP Rangaswami (the Chief Scientist at Salesforce and an old friend of VRM), who sees the world coming to be not only flat, but hyper-connected between everything -- people, devices, and the rest of it. Making all that work for individuals, as full-agency drivers, is what's key for VRM. It's also what KRL, the invention of Phil Windley at Kynetx, is all about. It's what full-duplex interactive APIs are about, as I'm sure Craig Burton will talk about at IIW.
Related to that is the issue of corporations as entities with the same rights as people, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided not long ago, in what I believe will go down as the Dred Scott decision of our time. (See < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott>.) What this has done is legitimize robotic super-people that in effect have greater privileges than individual biological people. They can create and amass far more wealth. They can skew democratic power away from people and toward their own narrow, often inhuman (and inhumane) interests. They can force on people onerous agreements that are unconscionable on their face, and yet are so normative that we hardly question them -- as was the case, for millennia, with slavery. Can VRM address this? I believe so. Tall order, but an important one.
Peer-to-peer power is something we haven't addressed much in conversations here. But we should. Some outfits, such as Diaspora and Status.net/OpenMicroBlogging/Identi.ca, do address it, and are very VRooMy. I believe folks from both those dev groups will be at IIW, by the way.
I could go on, but I do think you tap into a Big Deal here.
doc, you speak about the need to break the shackles of calf-cow, to release the captive customer in favor of a free one, and to develop 'cars' to give us independence on the net and web.
totally agree. but that concept feels a lot bigger than a relationship with vendors, which is why when i read through many of the posts here, i feel like VRM is actually a subset of what is being described as the bigger picture of VRM.
True.
so what does this landscape look like?
well, i appreciate drummond's idea to have some 'demo sell' ideas fleshed out at IIW. i can't wait to hear what people come up with.
what i imagine is an environment where the walls and silos drop away, and the orientation is shifted to a person-to-person type environment. this "car" that would be our tool of empowerment, independence and engagement, would essentially be a simulated self, or cybertwin.
I love that idea.
thinking of it as a personal data store still feels flat for me, like static information that is yet another thing i have to manage, protect and update. thinking of it as an actual persona, or the fullest _expression_ of aspects of my identity that i care to share, feels a lot more alive and real for me - it sounds like something i would want to be spending time cultivating.
in that respect, the more information about my choices and behaviors that are streamed into this persona, cross-referenced and contextualized, the better i'm able to understand myself, what i care about, and how my decisions impact my quality of life, so that i am better equipped to shift and adjust accordingly.
i don't need to 'own' anything... i just want to have access to my own patterns. *why* i make decisions is mostly only known by me, sometimes not even by me, and my reasons and justifications for doing things change constantly. i'm comfortable in that paradox and ambiguity. it makes me human and it's why marketing doesn't 'work' on me. but when i'm ready to make a purchase/decision/choice, i'm happy to assert my intentions in the marketplace, my ideal conditions, and the tradeoffs involved in interacting with me.
Yes. Great stuff. Well said.
the more i operate through my cybertwin, the more i understand myself, and the more *it* is able to function on my behalf without my intervention or guidance. interesting services can be built around that personal agent, making it easier to discover people, products, services, experiences, or whatever, that would be useful and meaningful to me. ultimately it feels like some kind of tool for actualization, where we're able to create a quantified and contextualized version of ourselves, have access to our patterns of behavior and the corresponding feedback loops, and then have the capacity to in turn make choices that are more fulfilling.
ok...... i'm not sure if i've crossed over into woo-woo territory, so i'll stop now.
it's not woo-woo. It's where we're headed for sure, and I love how you're running with it. I think "cybertwin" is a killer concept, and at the very least needs to be presented in Drummond's "demo" session at IIW, and on its own. If you don't bring it up, I will. (Though I'd rather you do it.)
I just added "cybertwin," with credit to you, to my book. You got it in under the wire. :-)
The main problem our cybertwins will have is with these companies here...
... plus these here...
... plus Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and other cyber-marketers not listed above, who are going to say "We can help," because "we have ways of knowing you better than you know yourself," and "don't worry about your personal privacy... we'll just fill your cybertwin with appetites for stuff you had no idea you really wanted."
This is why intention matters. Your cybertwin should be filled with your agency and intentionality, and with the ability to discriminate between what you actually intend, and what robot marketers think you ought to intend.
This is subtle stuff, but needs to be made as muscular as possible. Still, in many ways, this is virgin territory.
i guess when i imagine VRM as i understand it now, i see an image of myself about 10" tall, holding a little piece of paper with my Personal Terms of Service, and holding it out to a goliath, and him just laughing in my face.
Better to see yourself as the kid with the slingshot.
Or better yet, the kid who makes slaves of the Golaiths.
i want to be inspired to imagine a scenario where there's a level playing field in which i am an empowered agent, i have a wide range of ways in which to express, exchange, create and receive value, and there is a minimum standard of trust and ethics that i will tolerate when considering interacting or transacting with you.
- venessa
You're doing a good job of inspiring, right now. Thanks.
Doc
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