killer app, firefly, is simply management awareness, outsourcing to customer

The following are excerpts from a document, killer_app. It is in pdf form and google, which searches the bodies of online pdf's, will find it by searching long phrases excerpted below .

I had downloaded this pdf long ago to find a movie showing how a young lady found the nerve to take leadership responsibility in choral direction through the play and coming to awareness that dance gave her. 

I did work now on this document to find interesting to me stuff that you all might find interesting as well .  In particular, I felt it relevant to ideas behind collaborative open operating system object oriented programming development seasoned up with fun graphics introduction .

I am also paraphrasing from "Inner Game of Music" where shoulds are said to block awareness of what is and interfere with natural process to maturity .

The point of croquet is not specialized to distributed graphics, rather it is an injunction against forcing symbolic brain patches to fire because they are considered more "Piaget mature". That forcing interferes with education .

Trying to be "mature" rather than giving psychological permission for intermediate process steps to being mature  has the inner game's so called self1 interfere with the process of maturation . This notion attaches nicely to the idea (not to be confused with permissiveness) of psychological permission .

Forcing symbolic reasoning has this self 1 block awareness of and psychological permission for the more "primative" Piaget stages of visualizing then doing that have a child naturally and of his own nature become symbolic .

The point of croquet is not distributed graphics but rather non-interfering awareness generating an N-way symbolic interface for a collaborative community .

When Wolfram developed Mathematica with oop, in those times, oop was held, not open, but rather secret by corporations . For quite awhile, oop has been out in the open . I might compare the transition from corporate secrecy to open collaboration to declassification of WWII radar which made Feynman envy Gellman for having published .

I am very interested in a market based on open things, things whose secrets don't make them valuable . I want a market where a man isn't embarrassed to teach and develope his compositional skills .

In what follows, from the killer_app prescription the boundary between the consumer and producer become more "porous" ; the boundary becomes 2-way .

Preaching awareness blocks it (hooks the rebel in TA); pointing awareness to profits from awareness might or might not be perceived as preaching . One can choose not to profit ; my construction worker friend chooses to play with his children and not work all the time ... . I fear being perceived as preaching or using the old sales model as I try to merely invite the "new" one .

killer_app is a pre dot com document, but dot com didn't follow the new business model of killer_app, so don't blame killer_app .

"The Customer Is the Best Product Developer "

"extreme example of using digital technology to outsource product development is Firefly, a fast-growing start-up that began life as a project at the MIT Media Lab. MIT professor Pattie Maes had developed some powerful pattern-matching algorithms and decided to let them loose on the Web in the form of a game whose goal was to recommend music that visitors to the site might enjoy. ... Given the chance, customers are more than happy to tell you what they want."

Yet, reading "Leonardo's Laptop" which was about outsourcing to the customer never "grabbed" me. It championed customer awareness groups and class action suits for lousy error message dialogue boxes, awareness in the customer of what he didn't want rather than awareness in the producer of what the customer wanted . Though it claimed novelty , it wasn't the so called "gift economy" of "Brief History of the Future" but rather subscribed to the old business model .

Alan Kay : "Context is worth 50 IQ points."
...
"More importantly, learning interfaces transform the customer interaction into two-way conversations. The immediate benefit of these conversations to the seller is that they know instantly when they are not serving the customer's needs. Over the longer term, the learning interface becomes the primary mechanism for creating the communities of value we described in Chapter 4. Enhancing the interface to let customers talk to each other as well as to you changes the dialogue from two-way to N-way. That, at least, is the beginning of community."

"Context comes from listening and observing, and that is what managers need to do."

Now, I force a better ending :

I am interested how, in my computer algebra training personal training program, AI produces, for me, a learning interface . AI, to be interesting to me, must allow input of human judgement, it must learn from me as I from it.

Using it must untie hands from mechanical routine to allow what is essentially me to come to the table. But, interface and "tables" also suggests others come to that table and all their hands be untied . The capacity for abstraction and getting those hands untied comes with visualizing and doing .

Distributed computing unties people and is a metaphor of what (artificial) intelligence is .

To get back to my orphan feelings at Cal Tech when I supported the lady from Harvard against "the mob" (behavior) and thereby, rather than be a stranger, "introduced" myself :

Learning to recognize its own mother may be the first significant individual and non-genetic thing a baby does to wire himself . There are, however, different patches of brain tissue that recognize isolated pieces of faces and that something is a face . Baby's wiring can be learned from but can also be improved . "The fundamental" should be a two way learning interface involving real people. Psych 101 (long ago) taught, that the wire mother alone is discouraging to a young monkey's wanting to go out and explore .

You may recall that individuals in the Cal Tech audience were playing gadfly by saying that her research was not fundamental but that brain area could as easily be trained to recognize volkswagens , in one handwaving gesture dismissing Konrad Lorentz as a goose . Gads. Someone started perhaps kidding and then, not to be outdone, others started nervously copying . What an opening I shall remember forever when seeking my own nerve to not crater .

;-)