How do you deal with competitors in open systems?

Published on May 30, 2009 — Comments

I’m struggling at White House 2 with how to make a multi-partisan, yet still collaborative, site work.

The core problem is that there are two very different types of people involved in U.S. politics, people who want government to work, and people who don’t. Please don’t take this as a knock on any given political party, because that misses the point. There are plenty of Republicans and Democrats who want to make government a success. I’m talking about the people who feel, quite rationally, that government is bad and want it to fail.

This same problem exists in the context of a business. While shareholders, executives, employees, and customers may have different goals for the business, they all want the company to be successful. But there’s one group that doesn’t: competitors. They want the business to fail. And that’s the crux of the issue in politics too. Many view government as competition to private industry and their own freedoms, so a failed government is a good thing.

So how do you deal with competitors, people who want you to fail, in an open, transparent, and collaborative system like what I’m trying to build with White House 2 and NationBuilder?

And I’m not talking about trolls, people who are trying to muck up the process itself. Plenty of thought has gone into that. This issue is specifically with people who are sincerely participating in an open process with the goal NOT of making the process fail, but the thing itself fail.

Please comment below or on Hacker News.

Jim Gilliam

Thanks for your thoughts.... I do remember reading recently about the registration/moderation approach having the opposite effect of what was intended.

What about the people who in fact want the *general* project to fail. Let's say I'm running Craigslist in an open fashion, anyone on the internet can be involved on how the company should be run. It's quite reasonable to expect that people working at newspapers might view the success of Craigslist as directly hurting their ability to make a living. So they participate in how Craigslist should be run, and suggest things like charging for listings so their classified ads wouldn't be undercut.

I suppose more and more transparency does help that, although it might be hard to actually get that out of people. But if you know that 70% of the people supporting this one idea all happen to work in the newspaper industry, then you can take that into consideration.

So then, how does that manifest itself on a website in an easily digestible way. We can't expect everyone to delve into everyone else's background. Maybe there's a means of tagging other people? In politics, it could be something like "20 people tagged this person a lobbyist"...something like that.

Nick Tesla

You may want to read "smart start-ups" or "The Social Network Business lanModel," both by David Silver. In the former, Silver argues for reputation management rules to block "sex perverts and other psychopaths," "corporate flacks" and others who don't cooperate. Matter of fact, he says:

"Sure, people can register under multiple IP addresses and thus appear to be sheep, when they are in fact wolves in sheep's clothing. But through aggressive collaborative filtering, data mining, exchange of information between communities through the reputation management organization and pattern matching, people who change their online pseudonyms can be discovered."

While this sounds extreme, perhaps only by exploring the extremes will we finally deal with the three-cornered problem of IDENTITY, which is required in order to establish trust, ANONYMITY, which is required in open systems to which predators have access, and PRIVACY, which the internet has yet to effectively address.

Daniel DeLorme

Maybe there's a way to make these people work *for* the system, despite their efforts to the contrary? If somehow the effect of their actions could be measured, and those actions were found to have a consistent bias *against* the objectives of the system, then you could internally label them as saboteurs and do the opposite of whatever they say; i.e. if a saboteur votes for X that should be counted as a vote *against* X. Of course the trick is figuring out how to measure this consistent "saboteur's bias". You could apply statistical clustering techniques to separate users into two groups and label one of them as saboteurs... but which one? Or you could use a baseline group of "trusted" users and people with behavior opposite to that core group would be labeled saboteurs... but that would risk excluding all dissenting opinions. It's a tricky problem, no doubt about it.

How do you deal with competitors in open systems?

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