Learning from bad @TWC #CX

Here in New York City, Time Warner Cable is down. (I’m getting on over my mobile phone’s T-Mobile data connection.)

According to DownDetector, TWC is also down in a lot of places:

This is a developing story, in the midst of which I can take the opportunity to have a meaningful encounter with CX — Customer eXperience. Let’s make lemonade.

My cable modem shows the connection is live, but just blinking steadily in its attempt to pass data back and forth with TWC itself. Earlier ping tests (when the connection was merely bad) went somewhere, but latencies were all high. Now they go nowhere.

Calls to Time Warner Cable get me a message: “All circuits are busy now. Please try again later. Message NY-224-55.”

A visit to @TWC_Help finds the last two postings are on 15 and 22 August. TWC’s many other social channels on Twitter are useless promotional vehicles. A Twitter search for TWC shows lots of problems in lots of places, right now. So this is a developing story.

No doubt the story in the mainstream media will go along the lines of these two:

• 8 worst companies for customer service (TWC is #2)
• Massive survey finds Comcast and TWC are the two most hated companies in America — period

The big angle will be around the planned merger of  TWC and Comcast — two well-hated ogres.

But we’re here to help, not complain. What can we do with VRM here? Not just for TWC, but for every company in TWC’s position? Specifically,

1. What code do we have already? and 
2. What development paths are VRooMers on that can lead toward better CX?

[Later…] Nice follow from @Comradity.

Getting Respect

Respect Network (@RespectConnect) is a new kind of corporate animal: a for-profit company that is also a collection of developers and other interested parties (including nonprofits) gathered around common goals and principles. Chief among the latter is OIX‘s Respect Trust Framework, which is “designed to be self-reinforcing through use of a peer-to-peer reputation system.” Every person and organization agreeing to the framework is a peer. Here are the five principles to which all members agree:

Promise	We will respect each other’s digital boundaries	Every Member promises to respect the right of every other Member to control the Member Information they share within the network and the communications they receive within the network.
Permission	We will negotiate with each other in good faith	As part of this promise, every Member agrees that all sharing of Member Information and sending of communications will be by permission, and to be honest and direct about the purpose(s) for which permission is sought.
Protection	We will protect the identity and data entrusted to us	As part of this promise, every Member agrees to provide reasonable protection for the privacy and security of Member Information shared with that Member.
Portability	We will support other Members’ freedom of movement	As part of this promise, every Member agrees that if it hosts Member Information on behalf of another Member, the right to possess, access, control, and share the hosted information, including the right to move it to another host, belongs to the hosted Member.
Proof	We will reasonably cooperate for the good of all Members	As part of this promise, every Member agrees to share the reputation metadata necessary for the health of the network, including feedback about compliance with this trust framework, and to not engage in any practices intended to game or subvert the reputation system.

The Respect Network’s founding partners are working, each in their own way, to bring the Respect Trust Framework into common use. I like it as a way to scaffold up a market for VRM tools and services.

This summer Respect Network launched a world tour on which I participated as a speaker and photographer. (Disclosures: Respect Network paid my way, and The Searls Group, my consultancy, has had a number of Respect Network partners as clients. I am also on the board of Flamingo and  Customer Commons, a nonprofit. I don’t however, play favorites. I want to see everybody doing VRM succeed, and I help all of them every way I can. ) We started in London, then hit San Francisco, Sydney and Tel Aviv before heading home to the U.S. Here’s the press coverage:

• Geeks New Desk in BWW: Respect Network Announces 20 New Founding Partners in Advance of Global Launch (4 June 2014)
• David Meyer in Gigaom:  Privacy and “marketing nirvana” in one package? Meet the Respect Network (23 June 2014)
• Nermin Bajric in ARN: New global P2P data sharing network promises to restore Internet privacy (24 June 2014)
• Nick Booth in Datacenter Dynamics Respect Launches Campaign to Fund a Global Network (24 June 2014)
• Ian Murphy in Business Cloud,: Respect Network launches private cloud (24 June 2014)
• Duncan MacRae in Computer Business Review,  Respect Network’s Global Private Cloud Launch Marks Privacy Milestone (24 June 2014)
• Alex Hamilton in CloudPro: Registration open for “world’s first” global private cloud (24 June 2014)
• PR Newswire: Launch of World’s First Global Private Cloud Network Kick Starts the Internet Privacy Revolution (24 June 2014)
• Phil Wainewright in Diginomica:  Respect Network offers antidote to Facebook privacy flaws (25 June 2014)
• Amir Mizroch in The Wall Street Journal: Network Lets You Sell Your Data For Cloud Storage (25 June 2014)
• Max Smolaks in TechWeekEurope: Respect Network Wants Members To Get Paid For Their Data (25 June 2014)
• Haydn Shaughnessy in Forbes: The Future Business Platform – You (30 June 2014)
• Steven Kiernan in CRN: New global network promises end to privacy fears — Never let your data get sold for marketing again. (1 July 2014)
• Mary Branscombe in CITEworld,: Why Facebook’s user experiment is bad news for businesses (2 July 2014)
• John Leonard in Computing:  Ironically Facebook is our inspiration, says privacy-by-design social start-up Respect Network (3 July 2014)
• Bryon Connolly in CIO:  The Rise of the Personal Cloud (3 July 2014)
• Stuart Corner in The Sydney Morning Herald:  Respect Network puts users in control of their personal data – and in the money (7 July 2014)
• Graeme Philipson in ITWire:  Respecting your privacy – new ‘private cloud’ to take on Facebook. (8 July 2014)
• CMO: Flamingo Joins The Respect Network As Founding Partner (9 July 2014)
• Brian Karlovsky in ARN,  Flamingo launches Personal Cloud on the Respect Network (9 July 2014)
• David Braue in CSO: Respect Network marries security, trust in portable cloud data push (9 July 2014)
• Brian Karlovsky in ARN: Flamingo launches Personal Cloud on the Respect Network: Respect Network is billed as world’s first global network for trusted private data sharing (9 July 2014)
• iStart:  Respect Network turns personal data into currency but maintains privacy (10 July 2014)
• Stilgherrian in ZDNet: Big data is just a big, distracting bubble, soon to burst (11 July 2014)
• Stanislas Nouveau in Which-50: Can personal clouds rebalance control back towards the consumer? (11 July 2014)
• Angus Kidman in Lifehacker: The Simple Solution To Big Data Challenges: Ask Your Customers Instead (11 July 2014)
• David Shamah in Times of Israel: Respect Network promises web privacy as priority — New initiative aims to ‘take back the Internet’ from clutches of companies that freely use private users’ data (13 July 2014)
• Gil Tanenbaum, Jewish Business News: Lookout Facebook, Israel Moving To New Respect Network (14 July 2014)
• Drummond Reed (Respect Network’s CEO) in ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) Technology & Games: How Much Data Monitoring is Too Much? (17 July 2014)
• Paul Wallbank in Smart Company: How the internet was a big reset button for business (23 July 2014)
• Paul Wallbank in StartupSmart: How the internet was a big reset button for business  (24 July 2014)

In the midst of that, Respect Network also announced crowd funding of this button:

It operates on the first  promise of the Respect Trust Framework: We will respect each others’ digital boundaries. Think of it as a safe alternative to the same kind of button by Facebook.

The campaign also launched =names (“equals names”) to go with the Respect Connect button, and much else, eventually. These names are yours alone, unlike, say, your Twitter @ handle, which Twitter owns.

There is a common saying: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” In respect of that, =names cost something (like domain names), though not much. Selling =names are CSPs: Cloud Service Providers. There are five so far (based, respectively, in Las Vegas, Vienna, London, New York/Jerusalem and Perth):

    

They  are substitutable. Meaning you can port your =name and data cloud from one to the other as easily as you port your phone number from one company to another. (In fact the company that does this in the background for both your =name and your phone number is Neustar, another Respect Network partner.) You can also self-host your own personal cloud. Mine =name is =Doc, and it’s managed through Danube Clouds. (I actually got it a few years back. The tech behind =names has been in the works for awhile.)

The tour was something of a shakedown cruise. Lots was learned along the way, and everybody involved is re-jiggering their products, services and plans to make the most of what they picked up. I’ll share some of my own learnings for ProjectVRM in the next post.

 

 

Apple HealthKit and VRM

With iOS8, Apple is releasing a pile of new capabilities for developers, such as HomeKit, CarPlay, Family Sharing and HealthKit. These don’t just bring new stuff to your iPhone and iPad. Start digging and you see a framework for personal control of one’s interactions in the world: one that moves Apple away from the norms set by Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other companies that make most of their money in the advertising business.  Explains Greg Lloyd,

Google, Yahoo and others gather correlate, analyze and use personal identity metadata including your location, search history, browsing history to monetize for their own purposes or to sell to others. I believe Apple is trying to build a counter story on security using identity and services encapsulated in devices you own. In addition to continuity, examples include OS8 MAC address randomization for WiFi localization privacy and hardware partitioned storage of iOS fingerprint data.

The italics are mine. Our devices — phones in particular — are becoming extensions of our selves: as personal as our chothes, wallets and keys. They bring new ways for us to engage with people, organizations and other things in the world. There is enormous room for growth in personal empowerment with these devices, especially if those devices are fully ours, and not the hands of advertising companies in our pockets.

Apple, one hopes, aims mainly to enhance our agency — our capacity to act with effect in the world — through our mobile devices. And they have an important advantage, beyond their gigantic size and influence: we pay them. We don’t pay Google, Facebook and Yahoo for most of what we get from them. Advertisers do.

Haydn Shaughnessy unpacks the difference in The Revolution Hidden In The Apple Health Kit :

When you do business with Google, as a consumer, you strike a deal. In return for free search you get ads and for those ads you agree to your data being collected, stored and sold on. The way Apple sees business up ahead, when you use an Apple health service, Apple manages data for you, on your terms. That is a revolution.

So, as I’ve been digging thorugh the scant literature on Healthkit and Apple’s new Health app, I’ve looked for ways they line up with VRM principles, goals and tool requirements. Here’s what I see (√ is yes, ? is don’t know. x is no — but I don’t see any of those yet):

VRM Principles

√ Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors
√ Customers must be the points of integration for their own data
√ Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
? Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
√* Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

VRM Goals

√ Provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations.
√ Make individuals the collection centers for their own data, so that transaction histories, health records, membership details, service contracts, and other forms of personal data are no longer scattered throughout a forest of silos.
√ Give individuals the ability to share data selectively, without disclosing more personal information than the individual allows.
√ Give individuals the ability to control how their data is used by others, and for how long. At the individual’s discretion, this may include agreements requiring others to delete the individual’s data when the relationship ends.
? Give individuals the ability to assert their own terms of service, reducing or eliminating the need for organization-written terms of service that nobody reads and everybody has to “accept” anyway.
? Give individuals means for expressing demand in the open market, outside any organizational silo, without disclosing any unnecessary personal information.
? Make individuals platforms for business by opening the market to many kinds of third party services that serve buyers as well as sellers
? Base relationship-managing tools on open standards and open APIs (application program interfaces).

VRM Tools:

√* VRM tools are personal. As with hammers, wallets, cars and mobile phones, people use them as individuals,. They are social only in secondary ways.
? VRM tools help customers express intent. These include preferences, policies, terms and means of engagement, authorizations, requests and anything else that’s possible in a free market, outside any one vendor’s silo or ranch.
√ VRM tools help customers engage. This can be with each other, or with any organization, including (and especially) its CRM system.
√ VRM tools help customers manage. This includes both their own data and systems and their relationships with other entities, and their systems.
√* VRM tools are substitutable. This means no source of VRM tools can lock users in.

That’s a wishful reading, and conditional in many ways. The *, for example, means “within Apple’s walled garden,” which may not be substitutable. Greg thinks this isn’t a problem:

…many people value a safer, more consistent, curated, and delightfully designed user experience to a toolkit… I want my personal information and keys to access heath, home, car, family information stored in a walled garden in a device I own, with gated access looking in for Apps I authorize, and freedom to search, link and use anything looking out. Apple appears to be develop its stack top down, starting from a vision of a seamless user experience that just works, giving developers the extensions they need to innovate and prosper.

As a guy who favors free software and open source, I agree to the extent that I think the best we can get at this stage is a company with the heft of an Apple stepping and doing some Right Things. If we’re lucky, we’ll get what Brian Behlendorf calls “minimum viable centralization.” And maximum personal empowerment. Eventually.

I am also made hopeful by some of the other stuff I’m seeing. For example, Haydn quotes this from @PaulMadsen of Ping Identity (both of which are old friends of VRM):

Apple is positioning its Health app as the point of aggregation for all the user’s different health data, and Health Kit the development platform to enable that integration.

In this I hear echoed (or at least validated) Joe Andrieu‘s landmark post, VRM — The User as a Point of Integration.

I also think Apple is the only company today that in a position to lead in that direction. Microsoft might have been able to do it when they dominated the desktop world, but those days are long gone. Our main devices are now mobile ones, where Apple has a huge share and great influence.

Apple is also working with Epic Systems (the largest B2B tech provider to the health care business) and the Mayo Clinic (the “first and largest integrated nonprofit medical group practice in the world”). Out of the gate this has enormous promise for bringing health care systems into alignment with the individual, and for providing foundations for real VRM+CRM connections.

Of course we’ll know a lot more once iOS 8 gets here.

Meanwhile, some questions.

• Can data gathered in the Health app easily flowed out into one’s non-Apple personal cloud or data store, and then flowed into the health care system of the individual’s choice?
• In more concrete terms, would a UK citizen with integrated data in her Health app be able to flow that data into her Mydex personal data store, and from there into the National Health Service?  I don’t know, but I hope Mydex, Paoga, Ctrl-Shift and other players in the UK can find out soon, if they don’t know already.
• Likewise, for the U.S., I would like to know if data can flow, at the individual’s control, back and forth from one’s Personal data vault or one’s Bosonweb or Emmett personal cloud and one’s Apple-hosted health data cloud (or a self-hosted one connected to one’s Apple cloud. And if data can easily flow from those to doctors and other health care providers. In Personal’s case, I’d like to know if data can flow through the Fill It app, which would be a handy thing.
• For Australia and New Zealand, I’d like to know if the same thing can be done for individuals from their MyWave, Welcomer, Geddup or Onexus personal clouds. I’d also like to know if data in the Health app can be viewed and used through, for example, Meeco‘s app. And what are the opportunities for any of those companies, plus 4th Party, Flamingo and other players, to participate in an ecosystem that has any and all of the companies just mentioned, plus Medicare (the Australian national health service, not to be confused with the American one just for persons 65+)?
• Same questions go for Qiy in the Netherlands, CozyCloud in France, and many other VRooMy developers in other places. And what’s the play for the Respect Network, which brings consistencies to what many of the developers listed above bring to the market?

In all cases the unanswered question is whether or not your health data is locked inside Apple’s Health app. Apple says no: “With HealthKit, developers can make their apps even more useful by allowing them to access your health data, too. And you choose what you want shared. For example, you can allow the data from your blood pressure app to be automatically shared with your doctor. Or allow your nutrition app to tell your fitness apps how many calories you consume each day. When your health and fitness apps work together, they become more powerful. And you might, too.”

Sounds VRooMy to me. But we’ll see.

 

Cluetrain’s One Clue

Most people reading The Cluetrain Manifesto go straight to its 95 Theses, and usually quote the top one. I won’t mention it, because I would rather focus on Cluetrain’s main clue, which most people miss. It says this:

“if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…

we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers.
we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp.

deal with it.“

This statement expresses the full Cluetrain spirit —not only because of what it says, but because it adrenalized us, and guided everything we wrote in the Manifesto from that moment forward.

If Chris Locke hadn’t sent that little .gif to David Weinberger, Rick Levine and me, it’s possible (or probable) that Cluetrain would not have been written. The One Clue was, and remains, that important.

I think there are four reasons why Cluetrain’s One Clue rarely gets quoted:

1. It’s separated from the 95.
2. It’s a graphic, so people can’t copy/paste text out of it.
3. It’s too hard for business people to accept.  And, because of that,
4. It’s not yet true.

I have come to believe it is mostly #3 and #4.

Cluetrain went up first as a website, in April 1999. Its first edition as a book went out in January 2000. (“Just in time to cause The Crash,” some have said.) It was niched from the start as a business book (subhead: “The end of business as usual”). And, from the start, it has been  stocked with marketing books in the business sections of bookstores, libraries, and  Amazon. Most of its readers are also marketing folk. They’re the ones who made the book a bestseller, and they are the ones tweeting about it as well. (Typically, many times per day.)

Irony: the One Clue was spoken straight to marketers, yet many of them (even clueful ones) are still treating us as seats, eyeballs, end users and consumers, and not as fully empowered human beings. Worse, many of them (or their systems) are spying on us in ways that simple manners would never allow in the physical world.

I started ProjectVRM because I believed #4 was true: our reach did not yet exceed marketers’ grasp. I also felt that marketers (and all of business) would benefit from increased native individual power. But something needed to be done before that could prove out.

We adopted the term VRM — Vendor Relationship Management — because it worked as the customer-side counterpart of CRM — Customer Relationship Management, which was already a many-$billion B2B business. In fact VRM is broader than that, because it applies to relationships with organizations, government agencies, and even each other. But the baby was named, and we stuck with it.

ProjectVRM is coming up on its 8th birthday in September.  We’ve made huge progress over the years. There are now many dozens of developers around the world, working on VRooMy tools, services and code bases. But we will not have succeeded fully until the One Clue proves true — or at least accepted , and therefore a just a historic artifact, rather than a glaring irony stuck in the craw of Business as Usual.

One tool still missing in the VRM box is the ability to set one’s own terms, conditions, policies and preferences, in one’s own way, for every company or service one deals with.

This capability was foreclosed early in the Industrial Age. That was when mass manufacturing, distribution and (eventually) marketing needed scale. Thus “standard form” or “adhesive” agreements, for many customers at once, became the norm in big business throughout the Industrial Age.

I expected them to be obsoleted as soon as we got the Internet. Instead they became far more widespread and abused on the Net than in the physical world.

An example is websites. We need to be able to say, for example, “I will only accept the following kinds of cookies, for the following constrained purposes.” Or, “If we already know each other, and it’s cool with me, you can follow me as I go about my business, but only for purposes I allow and you agree to.”

We would say this in proper legalese, of course, and in forms that are readable by machines and ordinary muggles, as well as lawyers — like we have with Creative Commons licenses.

Writing these personal terms and policies is a challenge raised by references to “boundaries” in the Respect Trust Framework, which I visited in Time for digital emancipation  and  What do sites need from social login buttons?

We created Customer Commons to do for  personal boundaries what Creative Commons does for copyright. That’s why I want to see at least some of those terms inside Customer Commons, and put to use across the Web, before ProjectVRM’s 9th birthday.

Meanwhile, big thanks to the Berkman Center for giving us a great clubhouse for all these years. It’s been huge.

Live blogging #Smalldata NYC

I’m at SmallData NYC, hosted by Mozilla.  What I’m writing here is not a report on the event (which will be up on the Web for all to see, soon enough), but rather my own #VRM-based riffs on what the panelists (and later the audience) are saying.  The purpose of an event like this is to get people thinking and talking. So that’s what I’m doing here.

• New word for me: deconvolve. I like it, but gotta look it up.
• Actual and clear intent is more valuable than inferred intent.
• Whatever happened to AskJeeves-type search?  Such as “I’m looking for Michael Jordan the AI expert, not the basketball player.”
• Thought: Why does search have to be so effing complicated.
• The Net has no business model. That’s why it supports an infinitude of business.
• At the moment a common (if not prevailing) business model on the Web is surveillance-based personalized advertising. This is not the same thing as the Web itself. If protecting your privacy,  or “becoming an exile” from surveillance fails to support this business model, it does not break the model so much as provide feedback on what isn’t working — or what else might work better. And it certainly does not “break the Web.”
• “The Industry” is an interesting term. (One of the panelists “speaks for the industry.” I think here it means “commercial players on the Web.” In Hollywood it means Hollywood. I don’t think we’re even close to that level of metonymic maturity.
• “Small animal taxidermy is specifically an eBay problem.” I think I just heard that.
• I like “giving a user recommendations that are out of the cone of relevance.”
• Cone of Relevance is a good name for a band.
• Netflix recommendations are at least partly (or largely) about developing a long-term relationship with the company. Keeping subscribers. “If you know Netflix knows you, you’ll stay.”
• Battlestar Gallactica, by pure numbers, has high correlations with a children’s show for 3 year olds. Possibly because watchers of the show have little kids. “The math works,” but the manners don’t.
• On break, I’m with @Deanland, who sez, “All they seem to care about is how to glean information from people for the benefit of the sell side, with no discussion or apparent thinking about what the user wants, feels, means or cares about. The data is on a one-way street from buyer to seller, but only for the benefit of the seller, not the benefit of the buyer. Saying ‘It’s about serving them better’ actually means ‘We can sell them better.’ There is also a sense that it is a given that The Machine, run by the seller, can get all this information, with no conscious involvement at all by the people yielding the information.” (Hoping Dean — and others — will bring this up after the break. We’ve only had presentations so far, not discussions yet.)
• Also from the audience on break: “We need a personal data silo. For the person, the #smalldata holder — not the marketing machine.”
• Wendy Davis of Mediapost (moderator) is challenging the apparent belief, by the panel,  that more information about individuals held by companies is better for individuals. (I think she’s saying.)
• I’m a person. I want my to do my own damn personalization. Just saying.
• David Sontag, panelist, says usage data with Internet Explorer all goes to Microsoft.
• “People get much more upset with bad personalization than no personalization.” (Not sure I got that down right.)
• Chris Maliwat, panelist: It’s sometimes hard to perceive a company’s intentionality.
• All these companies are in the train business. We’re passengers, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, what we need are cars: instruments of independence, agency and personal utility — for ourselves, following our own intentions. I believe Mozilla is the only major browser that can fill this role, because it’s on our side and not on these companies’ side. The other browsers are all instruments of their parent companies.
• A reason people don’t get more creeped out by all this surveillance and personalization, is that there have not yet been clear, big, news-making harms. Once that happens, the game changes.
• David Sontag: “I can ‘t get a credit card that won’t share my information with other companies.”
• Wendy: “How do researchers get users’ true intent?” (e.g. her gender may be irrelevant to her search, but The System notes her gender anyway)
• Chris: Personalization is not about perfection, but about providing a range of choices.
• Wendy: “Do people actually know what they want?” My answer: yes. And the assumption that people mostly don’t know is a flaw in The System. So is the assumption that we are in the market to buy stuff all the time. If I want to know the height of Mt. Everest, that doesn’t mean I want to go there, or buy mountaineering gear, or anything commercial.
• Pat, from the audience, on intelligibility of recommendations: Pandora has filters that are domain aware… But lack of domain makes it harder to make recommendations intelligible.
• So far all of this is inside baseball. Except the game isn’t baseball. It’s building out the system in Minority Report. But instead of “pre-crime,” it’s all about what we might call “pre-sales.” It’s this scene here.
• The panel conversation is currently (I think) about the user’s intent “being understood.” So I find myself channeling Walt Whitman: I know that I am august. I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood. I see that the elementary laws never apologize. Also, Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes… The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. I feel one of those yawps rising in me now.
• A question from the back of the room for “opt in, rather than opt out.” (Of tracking and all that.)
• Chris’s reply: “Google already exists.” The point is that Google and today’s Web giants are the environment. Deal with it.
• Audience guy: There is an imbalance between their control and mine as an individual. Right.
• Wendy: Targeting based on zip code isn’t especially personal. But what we’re talking about here is very personal. Doesn’t this raise issues?
• Slobodan: Maybe the Net will become more like the insurance business. (Did I hear that right? Missed the point, though.)
• Audience guy: What kinds of restraint exists now for users that don’t care about privacy at all — as with some young people.?
• I stirred things up a bit at the end (my barbaric yawp, you might say), but it’s over now, so I’ll need to do my own wrapping later.

Currently 9:15pm, EDST.

Okay, next day, 5pm.

I had hoped that Dean, quoted above, would be called, but he wasn’t, so I raised my hand and said that what the panel had talked about up to that point was mostly inside baseball — a metaphor that at least Chris wasn’t clear on, because he asked me what I meant by it. What I meant was that all three of the panelists were inside The Industry. And what I tried then to do was get them to stand on the other side, the individual’s side, and look at what they do from that angle. When they asked what was being done on the individual’s side, I brought up VRM development, and volunteered Kenneth Lefkowitz of Emmett Global to speak as a VRM developer. Which he did.

So that was it, or as close as I’m going to get in a blog post. When the event goes up on the Web, I’ll add the links.