randomosity

The con­sist­ently thought-provoking Chris Brogan explores how cur­rent digital tools provide for greater free­dom in employ­ment and life in gen­eral. Chris makes some pres­ci­ent refer­rals to tech­no­lo­gies and pon­ders why one should focus on being more mobile or con­sider being more nomadic. His post explores the equa­tion from the per­spect­ive of the nomad. I won­der what the per­spect­ive is from the other side — from those that would con­sider the nomad’s ser­vices. He raises the crit­ical ques­tion about data secur­ity and I won­der if this doesn’t extend to a lar­ger ques­tion of trust. I have only rarely been on the nomad employ­ing side of the equa­tion, but even by appre­ci­at­ing the nomadic per­spect­ive, I am chal­lenged to feel com­fort­able with the nomad. It’s not really about the res­ults — or about my level of trust. I agree with Chris and with Mark Har­rison who affirmed that the nomad should be paid for deliv­er­ing res­ults. What con­cerns me is the breadth of digital rela­tion­ships.
I have always shied away from con­trac­tual arrange­ments per­son­ally. I believe (per­haps naively) that if a rela­tion­ship works for both parties, then it will be per­petu­ated. Maybe that’s overly Uto­pian think­ing. Non­ethe­less, it does boil down to a trust issue and in a com­plex world, trust has to be meas­ur­able, demon­strable and to extend out­side of the imme­di­ate rela­tion­ship.
Increas­ingly, digital trans­ac­tions have attemp­ted to com­modify trust. eBay is a good example. The tra­di­tional auc­tion, medi­ated only by the slightly famil­iar auc­tion­eer has become more inform­a­tion rich based on trans­par­ent his­tor­ical trans­ac­tion data and more vis­ible repu­ta­tion. This has the­or­et­ic­ally allowed for more informed trans­ac­tions. The vis­ible social graph bey­ond eBay has exten­ded this into the employ­ment sphere. The tra­di­tional (per­haps myth­ical) one-on-one employ­ment rela­tion­ship has become more rare. Employ­ers often must account for their busi­ness actions to investors, vcs, out­side aud­it­ors and the like. Thus, while I may have impli­cit trust in your abil­ity to deliver res­ults, that trust can­not be tan­gibly extended/conveyed to third parties. The cur­rent inab­il­ity to com­modify this trust gets in the way of digit­ally nomadic employ­ment schemes. I am not arguing that they are not poten­tially far more effi­cient for both parties, only that we don;t have a means to adapt them to employ­ment infra­struc­tures that remain tra­di­tional.
I guess this is really start­ing to range into a dis­cus­sion of social cap­ital. I won­der whether this is some­thing that OpenSo­cial has any prom­ise of address­ing more imme­di­ately. I think it’s quite pos­sible that an informal meas­ure of social cap­it­al­iz­a­tion (I use that phrase delib­er­ately) can be garnered through cas­ual obser­va­tion of wall posts in Face­book or pos­ted applic­a­tion responses.
Wouldn’t it be cool if a digital score­board exis­ted that allowed for a more gran­u­lar demon­stra­tion of achieve­ments that provided a meas­ur­ab­il­ity of per­sonal trust and pro­fes­sional com­pet­ence. Wow…that’s way too Orwellian.