Cloud Cover

As a lot of you already know, I’ve been chewing over some recent conversations in the Interblogosphere. The Franklin Street Statement is the most directly relevant to the putative matter at hand: it extends the principles of free software to network services, making the point that if you care about software freedom, you want your rented operating systems to be as open as the operating systems you own. In his Open Tech talk and elsewhere, Danny O’Brien is doing a good job of teasing out the implications for ordinary people. As an ordinary person myself I’m highly invested in the integrity of my personal bits (which is why I almost never use my gmail address.)

But I think there are lots of interesting implications for companies, as well. I expect the impact of free and open network service licenses to be felt in the cloud world much as free and open operating system licenses have affected the server world; that is, profoundly, everywhere, and often in unexpected ways. Software vendors got away with some pretty coercive licenses for many years by making the assumption that users didn’t care all that much. Richard Stallman helped change all that. Not everyone cares about software licenses today, but many do, and any OS vendor that regards such concerns as external to their business is clearly wrong. Cloud providers who assume that their users won’t care how their data is handled are likely to find themselves equally mistaken. These issues have to be quantified somehow and included in the cost-benefit analysis.

Licensing is one of a number of such issues that used to be considered negative externalities - not affecting the balance sheet - but thanks to changes in our understanding, clearly aren’t. The most topical example is energy consumption for power and cooling in the datacenter. Until recently those numbers weren’t on the IT budget. Now they are. In our virtualization and grid work we have been looking hard at billing and chargeback tools, because we’re betting the next generation of hero and heroine CIOs will be not the ones with the vastest array of servers, but the ones best able to match infrastructure spend to cast-iron budgetary constraints.

That’s actually a pretty safe bet.

The question is, what other negative externalities are we assuming right now, that we will smack our heads for next year or in 2010? Since you asked, yes, I do have a couple of examples here. You’re all going to raise your eyebrows, because I’m going to talk about civility. Specifically, I want to talk about some costs associated with the lack of civility.

Blogreaders love to comment on blogs (making my earlier mistake with your comments all the more galling; I’m very sorry about that; see below) so it’s sobering to reflect that Boingboing, the archetypal blog, did without comments for years. Early efforts at providing a commenting system went unmoderated, because the five jetsetting Boingers are usually too busy to wade through hundreds of comments to pick out the wheat from the chaff. The unmoderated comment system degenerated into abusive chaos and the Boingers shut it down, before rebooting it earlier this year with Teresa Nielsen Hayden at the helm.

She’s a strong choice. Her personal blog, the delightful Making Light, has a comments community that’s become a byword for online civility. Boingboing’s commenting community has revived and the site has become even more fun to read. Teresa has become one of a number of community managers on the conference circuit who are teaching about troll whispering and moderation. The takeaway? A vibrant and courteous community is an ornament to any online property, no matter how stratospheric it already is. But people like Teresa are thin on the ground, and they will cost you. Without their subtle skills, good luck keeping people civil.

Anonymity itself may be the problem, as Alex Russell of the Dojo Foundation points out in this provocative piece. Alex wrestles with an issue that’s plagued the open source community for as long as there has been an open source community: why so few women? He proposes a code of conduct whose tenets - “respect others”, “value others’ contributions”, “assume good faith” and “be kind” - make clear exactly what kinds of problems women, or for that matter any newbies, face as they try to contribute to these kinds of projects: lack of respect, devalued contributions, the assumption of bad faith and unkindness.

Look at the demographics. We’re about to get another billion human beings online. The scarcest commodity on earth is human ingenuity. The last thing we can afford to do is squander that, even if it does happen to reside in a woman or a newbie. Casual rudeness and a sense of entitlement are exactly like wasteful electric appliances and needlessly coercive EULAs. They cost real money by driving away real business. Leaving them off the P&L statement is shortsighted at best. At worst, it’s suicide.