Not managing knowledge

we are not about managing anybody's knowledge. we are about making that knowledge come to your mind quicker and easier in a form that helps you draw out new meanings and pattern recognitions. you manage your knowledge and your networks. knowledge self management system or something... there are deep assumptions about power and collaboration built into what xigi is and what it does best. that said, giving a self described power user like A a dashboard for a wicked problem solution could pay well and push our understanding of the kinds of problems we are working on. R, our multinational corporation customers, has a wicked problem but people don't see it as readily.

medical debt is a wicked problem and people see it as such; something that changes its essential nature by how you define it. and that people will not agree on a definition. but you can create tools to help you manage toward partial, mediated solutions on a broad variety lower but still functionally meaningful levels, and create a kind of political working consensus on how things work and can be defined.
for example, we don't define social enterprise, because no one will agree on a definition. the word is invested with a dogmatic, intractable element of belief tied to a theory of change, of how the world should be. but we can define what investors expect from their money; market rate return or a mix of risk, return and impact.

if we built a tool to help with this project it would be a cool story to sell.
it would show we have a tool that facilitates the analysis and solution of wicked problems. there are a lot of big customers who'd want something like that.

customer engagement

1) Provide an information transfer of best practices in business ecosystem
mapping, and

2) Develop and/or provide software in support of these practices.

The objective of this engagement is the facilitation of improvements to the
efficiency and effectiveness of business ecosystem discovery conducted by
[Customer], to be guided by the principles
and approaches currently embodied in xigi.

Zoominfo's big move

A company with a lot more footprint, Zoominfo, moving into xigi's sights. .They have some feed the network characteristics about their model, zoominfo does... which is the cheaper and smarter way to do this, but they make you pay for feeding their network. that's a gating factor on their growth. if they could have grown more quickly to this point in the market shown by this development, they'd have been far smarter.. they constrained their own growth by a poor design. They didn't get to the best place as quickly and with as low a friction point as they could. But they are bigger and this is a far more valuable search result, with contextual characteristics, than they've ever shown before... the fact that it's a big surprise means they don't let customers into the design process, another point that adds needless friction.. But still, a nice result at the moment..

Three customers

we're moving forward on three customer engagements. one for sure, with heavy empahsis on services, one for product, and one still unclear. lots of decks are moving out. im trying to encapsulate and synthesize and become self aware of my discovery process and feed it into product definition and process sales. im getting asked to describe my process. glad gary is there to provide some structure. im saying xigi is a productization of the CI process he was involved in, he provides the structure that is essential. linda will be great with the big company on process i think.

eric provides an essential focus on the technology and what we are building.
im still not that aware of my process.. that's kind of odd to think about really; what about what i do becomes a replicable piece of hard coded process? it's seeing around things, between things, from different angles.. but xigi is a tool that lets you break apart the pieces of text and see the relationships in new ways.. that is one essential thing it does. andrew got that yesterday when he talked about breaking apart a report to see its authors, its funders, etc.

musing, in a narrative form, is a key piece of discovery. pausing to make sense of things, to reflect back, for me it's by writing, but sometimes by speaking, on what i'm seeing. the odd thing of having the way i work be turned into a methodology and a piece of code.. indians fought mapping in canada. maps and dreams talks about it. being hidden was their safety. that and letting people think what they wanted to think. reporting back the acceptable view. but when it came time to protect their land from the pipeline, to claim it as their own when it was going to be parcelled, they went along with mapping and clarity.

when they map you, then they've trapped you. they can say you are this and not that. to save the land from the pipeline, the indians let it happen. i am letting it happen to spread the transparency tool and methodology of xigi. i have not wanted to let that happen before, but this is a part of what in a strange, small way, you'd have to call my legacy; this will be something i leave behind. .... and that's all i can ay about that... at this point.

criterion call monday

notes, using blogger cus it is web based with auto save.. trying it for my phone notes.. maybe reduce a setp from word?
patient portion. that portion wearking havoc on the system patients turn those iblls into debts on credit card number one cause of bnakdruptcy doesn't write as wella s word. im slower. sitll latency of being online. ok expermient dropped

process as software

This post at the CI site suggests some ways to link the process part of the project with pattern language software methodologies.

Hive mind

In an effort to stay on top of the latest software trends and cool new startups, Intel on Monday made public a Digg-like voting site called CoolSW, for "cool software." The site will tap the geek public for the most promising new software companies worldwide.

"If you look at the great successes in software that have happened in the last few years, the so-called experts were very often wrong," says Steve Santamaria, director of Intel's software outreach group. "We ultimately have high hopes that the wisdom of crowds will find those long-tail independent software developers."

The CoolSW site joins a growing list of hive-mind projects looking for the next big thing.

Book publisher Simon & Schuster in June partnered with MediaPredict, which uses the "collective judgment" of readers to evaluate book proposals. And Dell's IdeaStorm uses features of social networks to solicit ideas for products and improvements.

From Wired

Question for XB: How will be build in feedback loops, at a smaller, startup scale but at low expenditure of resources, so that our customers can he help us build and extend our product? That's a question we might explore with our friend Ken Thompson at SwarmTeams