Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 15

Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending.

At the top level, the dashboards provide a view of spending by major government department, with graphs showing performance against schedule, costs, and the CIO's assessment of how well they are meeting their objectives. For example, here's a stark view of IT performance at the Veteran's Administration (click to expand image):

49% of the VA's IT projects are behind schedule, and Roger Baker, the agency CIO, deems that a full 63% of the projects are in need of serious attention. (Here's a recent article that outlines Baker's tough-love plans for IT at the Veteran's Administration.)

As you drill down, you get to dashboards for individual IT projects (800 projects and approximately $20 billion in budgeted spending). Each project shows the responsible government official, the prime contractors on the project, the CIO's evaluation of its progress against goals, and each month, an update showing an update of that progress. (We'll show one of these later in this article.)

The dashboards are an incredibly ambitious undertaking. In the first place, there has never been a government-wide view like this of all IT spending, and the progress of projects. What's even more remarkable, though, is that the dashboards are being shared with the public. It's a bit like having your performance review posted on the company bulletin board for all to see.

In notes provided to press in advance of the announcement, Vivek Kundra wrote (italics mine):

Over the past several years, we have witnessed numerous public failures of major information technology systems and just last year saw roughly one third of all investments reported as poorly planned or poorly performing. Many of these investments may never deliver on their original promises. With over $75 Billion in annual federal information technology spending, we need a new foundation for management - one built on the values of transparency, accountability, and responsibility....

Data is powerful. It enables monitoring, reporting, and meaningful analysis that leads to better decisions. Yet, in the case of federal information technology, we lack insight into project performance. Poor data quality coupled with infrequent reporting has led to lack of meaningful analysis and bad decisions. Numerous failures and cost overruns may have been avoided with timely access to accurate information.

The Administration is committed to using technology to move past these barriers. In the IT Dashboard, the public has a platform for unprecedented access to useful, unfiltered data regarding the performance of IT investments. Information available includes responsible government officials and contractors as well as project performance data, updated monthly. This enables better decision-making, giving us the ability to turn around poorly performing projects and to divest from those which no longer make sense.

In making this data publicly available, we are providing unfettered access to investment performance to its true owners - the American people.

Vivek explained that last point further in a telephone conversation with me last night. I asked him about the level of buy-in across the government for this kind of radical transparency about the performance of projects. He said:

"It's a cultural transformation, in terms of recognizing that we are in the public square. The work that we do is work that is supposed to be performed in the interest of the American taxpayers. And so making visible how we're performing means fleshing out these complicated issues in the public square. Culturally, making the shift is much better than letting it hide under the veil of secrecy.

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My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 6

I spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140conf a few weeks ago. My subject was the continuity of what I do, from publishing through conferences through my presence on twitter. I tried to draw the connections, and to explain how "social media" means drawing from, curating, and amplifying the voices of a community. I suggest that the role of an editor and publisher is analogous to the role of a point guard in basketball, handing out "assists" and improving the performance of his or her teammates. After all, I point out, I couldn't possibly tweet enough to cover all the topics I am interested in. But by using my retweets to build the visibility of others, I can create and foster a community that cares about the ideas, trends, and people that I care about.

My talk starts about 1:40 into the video, after a few comments from Jeff Pulver, the conference organizer. I've provided a lightly edited and linkified transcript below, for those of you who don't have time to watch the entire 15 minute video. If you do have the time, you can watch the video from the entire two-day conference at http://www.140conf.com/watchit.

What I learned from Twitter

Hi. I want to talk to you a little bit about Twitter and media. I'm a publisher. I'm a publisher in print. And it turns out I'm also a publisher on Twitter. I want to explain the roots of media and how that connects with what we're doing in this newest form of media.

When you think about the original use case of Twitter, which @Leisa described so wonderfully as “ambient intimacy,” it's really news from your close friends. But it's news nonetheless. And sometimes the news from individuals becomes news that matters to a whole lot more people. When someone in Tehran today is reporting their personal news, it's news that matters to all of us. And so you can see the continuum between the personal and the international in those moments.

But that continuum exists all the time, and it's existed always in media.

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A Manifesto on Health Data Rights

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 24

As a medical patient, I've always assumed that my medical records were something that I had a right to - after all, they are about me, and my freedom to share them with a second doctor, or see them myself so I can understand my own medical situation, seems self-evident. It was only the fact that so many of these records were on paper that made it so difficult for them to be shared. Electronic access would change all that.

I was surprised then, when I met recently with a congressman in Washington, a former physician, to talk about healthcare reform. When we moved to the topic of portable health care records, I was quite startled to hear him say "When I was practicing as a physician, I considered those records to be my property." After all, he said, they were his notes, his analysis. He obviously still felt this way.

Given this disconnect, I was glad to endorse today's Health Data Bill of Rights:

In an era when technology allows personal health information to be more easily stored, updated, accessed and exchanged, the following rights should be self-evident and inalienable. We the people:

1. Have the right to our own health data
2. Have the right to know the source of each health data element
3. Have the right to take possession of a complete copy of our individual health data, without delay, at minimal or no cost; if data exist in computable form, they must be made available in that form
4. Have the right to share our health data with others as we see fit

These principles express basic human rights as well as essential elements of health care that is participatory, appropriate and in the interests of each patient. No law or policy should abridge these rights.

I urge you to add your voice to mine by endorsing the health data bill of rights.

P.S. If you wonder whether a non-binding manifesto like this can have an impact on the deliberations of government, you have only to look at another similar statement, issued at the end of 2007 by a group of open data activists at a meeting organized by Carl Malamud of public.resource.org at O'Reilly, with support from Google, Yahoo! and the Sunlight Foundation, the 8 Open Data Principles. It was extremely gratifying to recently see the White House blog considering the commitment of the Obama administration to these principles.

Or consider the Robustness principle from RFC 761, the commitment to interoperability that provided a philosophical touchstone for the Internet, and has helped ensure its extraordinary resilience.

Statements of principle do matter. We may not yet have any idea what the exact format of an open health record system will look like, but we don't need to. If we establish the underlying principle of open exchange, the marketplace can sort out the details.

Health data exchange will unleash one of the great opportunities of the coming decade. Let's make it happen!

Velocity: The Art of Web Operations

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

Two years ago, at the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a group of web operations professionals, led by Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders along with O'Reilly editor Andy Oram, asked for a meeting with me. Their message: "We need a separate conference for our community." That community: the web operations professionals who keep sites up and running.

They knew I was receptive. A year earlier, I'd published a blog post entitled Operations: The New Secret Sauce. I had been pushing for years to get books on web operations into our publishing list (and in fact, Steve's book, High Performance Websites was in production at that time, and Andy had a number of other titles in the works.)

But nonetheless, the meeting felt like an intervention. It was absurdly exciting. I had been thinking in the abstract about the fact that as we move to a software as a service world, one of the big changes was that applications had people "inside" of them, managing them, tuning them, and helping them respond to constantly changing conditions. The skills and tools used by these people would need to be spread to a wider audience. But here were a group of these people - a big group - saying "We need an identity as a profession, and we need a gathering place for our tribe. We want your help."

How could I say no? We agreed to start with a "Summit" meeting to bring together the community and brainstorm ideas. Gina Blaber, our VP of Conferences, organized a meeting of 30 or 40 of the "big dogs", and the excitement was palpable. She moved quickly on from there to launch the Velocity conference. It was a success in its first year out, and the second annual conference, starting today in San Jose, promises to be even better.

What's more, the fact that attendance has surpassed last year, in an economy that has depressed attendance at many industry conferences by 30-50%, says something about the growing importance of this new field.

Back when I first began thinking about this topic for our publishing program, five or six years ago, observing that we needed books on what went on inside of Google and companies like it - the tools and processes they use to deliver such astounding performance and scale - the pushback was that "there are only a few companies operating at that scale."

But of course, if you've heard me speak, you've probably heard me quote William Gibson: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." Now, there are hundreds of companies (at least) operating at the scale that Google was operating at when I first made those statements. Over 700 of the people who keep them running are converging on San Jose today.

Velocity opens today with workshops and tutorials. The regular conference program begins tomorrow. The conference team has provided me with a special discount code for people who want to up-end their schedule and register at the last minute. Use VEL09BLOG for 20% off. There's also an Ignite session tonight, free and open to the public. Spike Night on Tuesday, a demonstration of how companies respond to huge spikes in traffic, is also open to non-conference attendees. It should be a fabulous gathering.

The Benefits of a Classical Education

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 29

As some of you may know, I got my undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin Classics. So when Forbes asked me to do an interview on the subject of how my Classical education had affected my business career, I agreed. The result, part of a special report called Power, Ambition, Glory, used only a small part of the interview I provided, so I decided to publish the entire interview here. Questions in bold were provided by Forbes in an email interview:

1. Tell us about a time when lessons learned from the ancients contributed to your success.

I love this question. As John Cowper Powys noted in The Meaning of Culture, culture (vs. mere education) is how you put what you've learned to work in your own life, seeing the world around you more deeply because of the historical, literary, artistic and philosophical resonances that current experiences evoke. Classical stories come often to my mind, and provide guides to action (much as Plutarch intended his histories of famous men to be guides to morality and action). The classics are part of my mental toolset, the context I think with. So rather than giving you a single example, let me give you a potpourri.

• The unconscious often knows more than the conscious mind. I believe this is behind what Socrates referred to as his inner "daimon" or guiding spirit. He had developed the skill of listening to that inner spirit. I have tried to develop that same skill. It often means not getting stuck in your fixed ideas, but recognizing when you need more information, and putting yourself into a receptive mode so that you can see the world afresh.

  This skill has helped me to reframe big ideas in the computer industry, including creating the first advertising on the world wide web, bringing the group together that gave open source software its name, and framing the idea that "Web 2.0" or the "internet as platform" is really about building systems that harness collective intelligence, and get better the more people use them. Socrates is my constant companions (along with others, from Lao Tzu to Alfred Korzybski to George Simon, who taught me how to listen to my inner daimon.)

  I believe that I've consistently been able to spot emerging trends because I don't think with what psychologist Eugene Gendlin called "received knowledge," but in a process that begins with a raw data stream that over time tells me its own story.

  I wrote about this idea in my Classics honors thesis at Harvard. The ostensible subject was mysticism vs logic in the work of Plato, but the real subject was how we mistake the nature of thought. As Korzybski pointed out in the 1930s, "the map is not the territory," yet so many of us walk around with our eyes glued to the map, and never notice when the underlying territory doesn't match, or has changed. Socrates was one of my teachers in learning how not to get stuck following someone else's map.

• When Alexander the Great came to see Diogenes in his barrel, he was so impressed by the philosopher that he offered him money. Diogenes scornfully pointed out that he had no need of money, to which Alexander replied, "Have you no friends?" I've always thought that Alexander had the better of this encounter. His awareness that even when your own needs have been met you can work for the betterment of others has helped me to understand that being a successful businessman can be a powerful way to contribute to society. In building a business, it's important to remember that you aren't just acquiring wealth for yourself, but creating value for your employees, your customers, and others whom you may never even meet. This is the principle behind one of the mottos we use at O'Reilly: "Create more value than you capture."

  Of course, the lessons for this one aren't just from the Classics but from all of literature. I'm mindful of a wonderful passage in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables about the good that Jean Valjean does as a businessman (operating under the pseudonym of Father Madeleine). Through his industry and vision, he makes an entire region prosperous, so that "there was no pocket so obscure that it had not a little money in it; no dwelling so lowly that there was not some little joy within it." And the key point:

  "Father Madeleine made his fortune; but a singular thing in a simple man of business, it did not seem as though that were his chief care. He appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of himself."

• I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. "The control of the appetites by right reason," is how he defined it. My brother James once brilliantly reframed this as "Virtue is knowing what you really want," and then building the intellectual and moral muscle to go after it.

• There are many topics, from open source software to web 2.0, where I've had to spend years trying to persuade others to a point of view that was at first foreign, then popular, then misunderstood and bastardized by those seeking to profit from the term without really understanding it. In telling the same story over and over again in different ways, I'm following in the footsteps of the Greek orator (alas, I forget his name) who said "The difference between a man and a sheep is that a sheep just bleats, but a man keeps saying the same thing in different ways until he gets what he wants.") Look at a series of essays like Hardware, Software, and Infoware, The Open Source Paradigm Shift, and What is Web 2.0? and you'll see me pursuing the same ideas, refining, clarifying, and advocating till I get what I want.

• I live with a constant consciousness of the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, and the alarming parallels to 20th and 21st century America. Today's venal partisan politics, driven by self-interested lobbyists, who all too often put personal gain ahead of the real interests of the nation, is eerily reminiscent of the way Rome fell from its high ideals. Heck, we're even replacing our military with mercenaries, one of the things that had disastrous consequences for Rome. Fortunately, we're still early in the process, and there is an opportunity to turn it around.

  There are of course also other parallels - many of which have been noted by the classically trained among our politicians. Robert Byrd's masterful retelling of the disastrous Athenian invasion of Syracuse (which ultimately led to their defeat in the Pelopponesian wars) highlighted the parallels with the US invasion of Iraq, and made clear that, as Mark Twain said, "While history doesn't repeat itself, it does rhyme."

2. If you could invite one classical figure to dinner, who would it be and why?

It would have to be Socrates, if only to know if he was indeed, as Plato said, "the noblest and best man ever to have lived" or rough clay refined by Plato's own imagination. I like to think he'd be a great guy to have around to ask the right questions of those in power today. We'd probably imprison him too, though!

3. Who is the most powerful person in your life?

My wife Christina. She's got a deep moral compass and a kind of intuitive sense of what matters. In our early years together, she had worries about me getting sucked too far into the competitive world of business, perhaps forgetting what is important. In so many ways, the kind of business I've built, which focuses on creating value for society and not just for the shareholders, is a reflection of my desire to build something she'd be proud of. I'm glad that I seem to have succeeded.

4. What is your secret ambition?

I'd love to have the time to learn to sing opera properly rather than bellowing half-formed fragments of melody in exuberant moments.

5. At what price glory?

While the willingness of the ancient Greeks to sacrifice their lives for glory brings tears to my eyes, I cannot ultimately condone the choice of Achilles. A short, glorious life in service of a greater good - say the life of the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the pilots in the Battle of Britain, of whom Winston Churchill said "Never have so many owed so much to so few," - that is worth praising. But for glory alone? I think not.

6. Greeks or Romans?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning explained why you can't make this choice:

"What I do and what I dream include thee,
As the wine must taste of its own grapes."

Both Greeks and Romans are part of my roots - part of all our roots. I can, however, admit to partiality to individual works: Homer over Virgil (and The Odyssey over The Iliad), but Horace over Theocritus, and much as I love classical Greek statuary, my deepest love is for Roman busts, those detailed portraits of real people, time travelers from an age so like our own.

Health Care Costs: Am I missing something? Or is there a lot of flimflam going on?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 59

Driving home from work, listening to NPR's story about health care costs, I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of numbers. The Obama health plan will cost a trillion dollars we're told. A TRILLION sounds big enough to end the debate, doesn't it?

Then I hear, almost as a footnote, that that trillion is over ten years. That's still a big number to be sure. A hundred billion dollars a year. But then later in the story, I hear that US total health care costs are $2.2 trillion a year. Suddenly, that $100 billion a year doesn't sound so big. That's only a 4.5% increase.

Doesn't it strike you as just a bit odd that we accept those kinds of increases from our insurance companies every year as a routine cost increase, but balk at the amount when it is presented as an attempt to overhaul the system?

Meanwhile, we're expected to believe that it's impossible to find 4.5% worth of cost savings in the system? That's also hard to believe. In this economic downturn, a lot of companies (including my own) have had to cut our costs a whole lot more than that in order to balance the books. Any industry with the will do so can find that much in the way of waste, duplication of effort, and improved processes that lead to cost savings.

All of this adds up to me to a description of a medical system out of control, a system in which everyone, from doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies, is out to get as much as they can from the system, and no one is willing or able to compromise. It's sad, a story of greed and small-mindedness.

Maybe I'm missing something - after all, I just got these numbers from a radio show - but if it really is only a 4.5% a year gap, it's really sad that we as a nation aren't able to find the backbone to expand coverage for everyone.

Personal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 2

In the past year or so, I've been urging people to work on stuff that matters. The world is faced with serious problems, and we in the technology community have a unique contribution to make, as the tools we've created help us to collaborate and organize at an unprecedented scale outside of industrial-era top-down organizations.

One area where technology and real world concerns meet is in the challenge of remaking democracy in a Web 2.0 world. With the support of the President of the United States himself, the US government is committed to exploring how to use technology to make government more transparent, accountable, and collaborative. How cool is that?

And how important is it that we, the technology community, rise to the challenge? If a couple of years go by, and nothing changes, the opportunity will have been lost; new media and new technology will be relegated to the dustbin of fads that have come and gone in Washington. It's up to us to make it not so, to prove to ourselves that we can indeed use technology to make a difference - in governing, but also in the critical tasks that face us as citizens: creating a more robust economy, improving our educational system, reducing the cost and increasing the effectiveness of health care, achieving energy independence and halting climate change.

I've been organizing two events in Washington to create new bridges between the technology community and the political community, the Government 2.0 Expo Showcase and the Government 2.0 Summit, to be held in Washington D.C. in early September. You'll be hearing more from me about these events in the coming months - they are consuming a lot of my time and energy as I try to understand how to bring the best of what we've learned about the age of networks to the problems of government.

But in the meantime, I want to let you know about an event that is happening in New York at the end of June.

Personal Democracy Forum is a two-day tech + politics brainfest that brings together a thousand political activists, organizers, hackers and hacks, along with many leading elected and government officials, NGO leaders, academic observers and journalists. It's now in its sixth year, taking place June 29-30 in New York City at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

This year's conference is focused on the theme of "We.gov" and all the ways that campaigns, elections, media, advocacy, and governance are becoming more open, participatory and collaborative. I've known the organizers, Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej, for several years now, and in addition to their work as technology advisers for the Sunlight Foundation, they are part of a vanguard of individuals who are leading that change.

Come hear keynotes from speakers including: White House CIO Vivek Kundra; Deputy CTO for Open Government Beth Noveck; State Department Senior Adviser for Innovation Alec Ross; New York Times columnist Frank Rich; Craigslist founder Craig Newmark; Fivethirtyeight.com blogger Nate Silver; Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey; Obama '08 new media director Joe Rospars; Edwards '08 campaign strategist Joe Trippi, writers Clay Shirky, danah boyd and Doug Rushkoff, and anthropologists of the future Mike Wesch and Mark Pesce, among many others.

In addition to covering lots of the brass tacks of doing politics in a networked age (online targeting, using mobile platforms, spreading viral video, raising money, harnessing volunteers effectively), the agenda also tackles a lot of cutting-edge topics, including:

• Twitter as a platform for organizing and fundraising (with speakers like Amanda Rose of Twestival and Abby Kirigin of the startup TipJoy)
• Imagining White House 2.0 (with Jim Gilliam of WhiteHouse2.org, Ellen Miller of Sunlight, Fabrice Florin of Newstrust and Mark Elliott of Collabforge)
• The Rise of Health Care 2.0: Participatory Medicine (with Esther Dyson and James Heywood of PatientsLikeMe)
• Building the Social Economy (with Doug Rushkoff and Tara Hunt)
• Redesigning .Gov for Transparency and Participation (with Clay Johnson and Ali Felski of Sunlight among others)

You can see the full conference details here.

O'Reilly Radar readers can save $100 off the conference registration by using this coupon code: "Oreimedi100"

Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 19

Jeff Bezos is very quotable. Listeing to Steve Levy interview him at the Wired Disruptive by Design event in New York, I was furiously taking notes. Here are the quotes I managed to capture:

"We've co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years," he says, explaining how ease of Kindle buying changes behavior.

"Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device....It's a myth that multi-purpose devices are always better.... I like my phone... I like my swiss army knife too, but I'm also happy to have a set of steak knives."

"I get grumpy now when I have to read a physical book....The physical book has had a great 500 year run, but it's time to change."

"If you're an incumbent in any industry, and rapid change is underway, you're uncomfortable, even if long term it's going to be good."

"I want to be able to provide every book ever published, in any language, in sixty seconds." Steve Levy then asks him about the GBS settlement, but Jeff declines to comment. But adds nonetheless: "That settlement needs to be revisited, and is being revisited....It doesn't seem right that you can get a prize for violating a large set of copyrights."

Steve Levy: Going back to disruptive internet companies from 1990s - "could an established company have understood how to build a great internet company?" Bezos: "One of the statistics I saw in 1994 that encouraged me to start Amazon was that net usage was growing 2300% a year. But it was still tiny....One of the biggest problems with big companies doing clean sheet innovation is that even if you see it, you have to be a really long term thinker, because for a long time it will be a tiny slice of the company.... The key thing is to be willing to wait 5, 7, 10 years. And most companies aren't willing to wait ten years."

Steve asks him about how he survived the years in which everyone doubted his strategy. Jeff replied: "There were two things: the business metrics, and the stock price. After the bust, the stock price went down, but the business metrics continued to improve....We had some very harsh critics during that time, but we always noticed that our harshest critics were among our best customers. Having a team that is heads down focused on building product makes you more resilient against outside opinion."

During the 1999 stock bubble, Jeff says he kept telling employees "Don't feel 30% smarter because the stock is up 30% this month, because you'll have to feel 30% dumber when it goes down."

"One of the differences between founder/entrepreneurs and financial managers is that founder/entrepreneurs are stubborn about the vision of the business, and keep working the details. The trick to being an entrepreneur is to know when to be stubborn and when to be flexible. The trick for me is to be stubborn about the big things."

He also talks about basing business strategy on things that aren't going to change: "I know that ten years from now, customers are still going to want low prices. I know they are going to want fast delivery. I know they are going to want the biggest product selection."

"There are a few prerequisites to inventing.... You have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to think lng term. You have to be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time. If you can't do those three things, you need to limit yourself to sustaining innovation.... You typically don't get misunderstood for sustaining innovation."

"At the end of the day, you don't end your strategy because other people don't understand it. Not if you have conviction."

"These new businesses are very energizing. We don't 'stick to the knitting'...I wouldn't even know how to respond if someone said 'Jeff, this isn't the knitting.' But we do make business decisions in a very deliberate way: we work backwards from customer needs, and we work forwards from our business skills."

"You've got to be willing to learn new skills if your customers need you to have those skills."

"18 months ago we launched Kindle with 90,000 titles. It's 300,000 now, and it's accelerating."

"We've made many errors. People over-focus on errors of commission. Companies over-emphasize how expensive failure's going to be. Failure's not that expensive....The big cost that most companies incur are much harder to notice, and those are errors of Omission."

Google I/O in Pictures: Google Culture at Work

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 9

I had a few miscellaneous notes on Google I/O that I wanted to share, including a few anthropological observations best made with pictures.

• I thought it was really interesting that there were more registration lines for Academia than there were for general admission. Google knows the same truth as Apple, that students are the future. They are making it really easy for students to get on board with their developer platforms. (I believe that there was a much lower student rate for Google I/O admission.) Good on them. (Note to self: we need a really good student rate for O'Reilly conferences too.)
  

• Google was having a bit of fun with their Streetview technology, with a bike riding around the conference creating a Streetview style experience of the event. Don't know if the view is up yet. If so, someone please post a link!
  

• I loved seeing the bike parking area, manned by a volunteer from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, who said that they were glad of the chance that Google was giving them to get additional visibility. (Again, note to self: we need to work with sfbike.org to do this for the Web 2.0 Expo, or just handle the bike parking ourselves. It would be great to do the same for Expo NY.)
  

Taken together, these images show a company whose unique culture shows through in small ways. This isn't marketing that you can fake; these small touches are a reflection of who Google is as a company.

As John Cowper Powys said, in one of my favorite books, The Meaning of Culture (1929):

Culture is what is left over after you have forgotten all you have definitely set out to learn...One always feels that a merely educated man holds his philosophical views as if they were so many pennies in his pocket. They are separate from his life. Whereas with a cultured man there is no gap or lacuna between his opinions and his life. Both are dominated by the same organic, inevitable fatality. They are what he is.

Great companies always have this sense of authenticity, while "me too" companies have a culture made up of the latest management fashions. I like to think that O'Reilly has an authentic culture. Our idiosyncracies are our strength, leading us in unexpected directions that is somehow true to something we might not recognize if we were following a map laid down by someone else.

Google Wave: the Early Days

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 10

After the press conference following this morning's keynotes, I was part of a small group conversation with Lars Rasmussen, head of the Google Wave team. He told the story of how they pitched Sergey Brin on the Wave project. "We'd worked on our message," he said, "and we boiled it down to this: 'We think we have an idea that will have a bigger impact on email than Google Maps had on maps.'" Sergey bought off on the idea. 'Nuff said.

Lars pointed out that he and Jens actually had enough "accrued" 20% time that they could arguably have done the project anyway. "We hadn't taken any 20% time since we started. So we had about eight months each saved up. You aren't really able to save up that much of it though, but we were prepared to make that argument if we needed to."

Lars had already moved to Sydney, and made the case that Wave could best be created there, where the team could operate as a kind of independent startup. Jens moved over, and they built the first prototype over nine months with a team of five, during 2007. Since then, the team has grown to about 100.

Judging from the number of people in the technical sessions on Wave at Google I/O, that development team just got a lot larger!

Lars also mentioned an interesting point about how developers can get their work noticed in Wave: you share extensions simply by using them in a wave. They can simply be installed from there. This will provide a viral vector for adoption of new extensions.

Lars pointed out that there is one way that Google's internally-developed extensions have "more power" than external extensions: some of them come pre-installed for all waves. They haven't figured out yet the right way to give that kind of access to third parties. But they are definitely thinking about it - and how automated trust metrics (e.g. how many people are using an extension) might be used to promote the work of external developers.

Recent Posts

• Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today? on May 28, 2009
• Google Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O) on May 27, 2009
• Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O on May 27, 2009
• Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team on May 23, 2009
• Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless) on May 19, 2009
• Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web on May 14, 2009
• Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow on May 10, 2009
• Who Will Cut The Gordian Knot of Healthcare Billing? on May 9, 2009
• Overheard: @edjez on innovation in mobile on May 7, 2009
• Overheard: @andrewsavikas on DRM on May 6, 2009