Open Process: the core of peer production, the core of the new society Excerpted from a two-part series by Toni Prug: * Toni Prug. Part 1: Series on Commu(o)nism: Open Process, the organizational spirit of the Internet Model, pt 1; part 2: Series on Commu(o)nism: Open Process, the organizational spirit of the Internet Model, pt 2. Engineering the privatization of the common Abstract “The desires and the sources of emancipatory potential of the commons for the cooperative and egalitarian global togetherness, for a new communism born through the new generation of tools and organizational practices, have temporarily been appropriated and hi-jacked by capitalism under the Open Source and to an extent Creative Commons movements. Excerpts from Part One Toni Prug: “It is a striking parallel that close to the birth of hacking, probably the most innovative and the most important programming language was born too. The source of distrust and founding principle are the same like in the case of Open Source, commercial interests and private profit. From Part Two
SkyBIM MTTR is more important than MTBF (for most types of F) This week I gave a talk at QCon SF about development and operations cooperation at Etsy and Flickr. It’s a refresh of talks I’ve given in the past, with more detail about how it’s going at Etsy. (It’s going excellently There’s a bunch of topics in the presentation slides, all centered around roles, responsibilities, and intersection points of domain expertise commonly found in development and operations teams. Being able to recover quickly from failure is more important than having failures less often. This has what should be an obvious caveat: some types of failures shouldn’t ever happen, and not all failures/degradations/outages are the same. Put another way: (for most types of F) (Edited: I did say originally “MTTR > MTBF”) What I’m definitely not saying is that failure should be an acceptable condition. If you think you can prevent failure, then you aren’t developing your ability to respond. We as web operations folks want our architectures to be built optimized for MTTR, not for MTBF.
La Cantine | La Cantine numérique de Nantes Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession anchored just east of Singapore By Simon Parry Created: 16:09 GMT, 8 September 2009 The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. The 'ghost fleet' near Singapore. The tropical waters that lap the jungle shores of southern Malaysia could not be described as a paradisical shimmering turquoise. His appearance, in a peaked cap and uniform, seems rather odd; an officer without a crew. Then I have it - his 750ft-long merchant vessel is standing absurdly high in the water. Simon Parry among the ships in southern Malaysia My ramshackle wooden fishing boat has floated perilously close to this giant sheet of steel. Navigating a precarious course around the hull of this Panama-registered hulk, I reach its bow and notice something else extraordinary. 'They are telling us to go away,' the boat driver explains. 'We don't understand why they are here. 'Some of them stay for a few weeks and then go away.
Digital » Blog Archive » Study: Tribalization of Business 2009 Organizations are not yet tapping social media’s full potential. Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice has released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study. The study evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. The second edition of the Tribalization of Business Study measures the responses of more than 400 companies including Fortune 100 organizations which have created and maintain online communities today. The study shows that companies are aware of the social tools. 32 percent of respondents are capturing data on how lurkers derive value from the community20 percent of respondents have set up formal “ambassador” programs, which give outsiders preferential treatment in return for being more active in the community39 percent of the respondents indicated that more full-time people are being deployed to manage the communities
About Time, Not Inventory by BILL WADDELL A volcano erupts in Iceland, the European air freight system slams to a halt, stores run out of products and manufacturers run out of parts - and its lean manufacturing's fault. That inane mantra has been repeated over and over again ad nauseum in the past weeks. The same nonsense is spewed any time something happens that having a mountain of inventory sitting somewhere would have solved. It is based on the same misguided thinking that has companies like Deere declaring themselves to be leaner because they gutted their inventories. The objective of lean is to cut cycle times. Inventory turns is not a measure of 'leanness'. There are two parts - a $100 part and a $5 part. In the first scenario you made greater improvement to inventory turns, but you still have an overall cycle time of 6 months because that is how long it takes you to get the longest cycle time part needed to produce. Lean doesn't care about inventory dollars.
Beyond Mass Customization - B. Joseph Pine II - The Conversation by B. Joseph Pine II | 2:29 PM May 2, 2011 This post is part of Creating a Customer-Centered Organization. Let me tell you a secret for creating the customer-focused organization: focus on the customer! That may sound tautological or even trite, but it has real meaning, because most so-called customer-focused organizations do nothing of the kind. Most recognize that there are no truly mass markets any more. Multiple Markets Within First identified by Stan Davis in his 1987 book Future Perfect, this progression from mass markets through segments and niches to mass-customized markets doesn’t end there. There is one more step: recognize that every customer is multiple markets. Think of travel. Or consider how your reading habits change with time. Mass Customization That’s why mass customization is so important today. When Stan Davis coined the term mass customization over 20 years ago, it truly was an oxymoron. To make it work, you must modularize your capabilities. B.
Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive: a milestone book on open design The Open Design experiments you will read about in this book — such as the 400 fab labs now in operation — are nodes within an alternative industrial system that is now emerging. These are the “small, open, local and connected” experiments that, for the environmental designer Ezio Manzini, are defining features of a sustainable economy. * Book: Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Bas Van Abel, Lucas Evers, Peter Troxler, et al. BIS Publishers, 2011. This is undoubtedly a very important book, and we are reproducting John Thackara’s remarks in full. John Thackara: “A new book from the Dutch publisher Bis, Open Design Now, includes essays, cases and visuals on various issues of Open Design. In 1909, Peter Kropotkin was asked whether it was possible to learn a trade so difficult as gardening is, from books. Although a book can offer good general advice, Kropotkin explained, every acre of land is unique. Open-ness, in short, is more than a commercial and cultural issue.
Enterprise Resilience Management Blog: Globalization, Trust, and the Supply Chain Charles Mann, author of the new book 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, recently wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal about globalization. ["The Real Story of Globalization," 6 August 2011] He began his article this way: "In the great tropical harbor of Manila Bay, two groups of men warily approach each other, their hands poised above their weapons. Cold-eyed, globe-trotting traders, they are from opposite ends of the earth: Spain and China. The Spaniards have a big cache of silver, mined in the Americas by Indian and African slaves; the Chinese bring a selection of fine silk and porcelain, materials created by advanced processes unknown in Europe. It is the summer of 1571, and this swap of silk for silver—the beginning of an exchange in Manila that would last for almost 250 years—marks the opening salvo in what we now call globalization. "The silk would cause a sensation in Spain, as the silver would in China. That's a bold claim.
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