Perilocity

John Quarterman on Mapping Spam and Politics (audio)

At a meeting on a completely different subject, I was interviewed about SpamRankings.net. Here's the audio, and here's the blurb they supplied:

John S. Quarterman, long time Internet denizen, wrote one of the seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

Quarterman took some time during Georgia River Network's Weekend for Rivers to speak with the Nonprofit Snapshot about spam-mapping and small town politics.

More about Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-prize-winning work on organizing the commons, and how that applies to SpamRankings.net.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

-jsq

A Picture of Denial

Paul Kedrosky posted this picture of new house construction seen through the branches of a tree blackened by the 2003 California wildfires. I can't top that for a picture of denial.

-jsq

He says he got it from the NY Times, but there's no link, so I can't attribute it further.

Outrage at Outrage Management

So we were discussing Peter Sandman's recommendations for outrage management, which mostly have to do with how to deal with management not doing something that you've given them rational reasons to do, because of some emotional resistance or other. The opposite problem also occurs: they believe you; they just don't care. Then you could use some outrage.

Alex brings up two good points in the previous comments:

I'm afraid that outside of usefulness in those communications channels, I just would hesitate to use the term "Outrage". For example, creating "Outrage" metrics sounds like you're working in hollywood publicity for Paris Hilton, not protecting business assets. :)

Yes, exactly, it's usefulness in these communications channels, that is, with management, that emotion, up to and including outrage, has to be used and managed.

Outrage: Less and More

We've been discussing Outrage Considered Useful. Alex remarked in a comment:

The term "Outrage" suggests that risk cannot or should not be discussed in a rational manner.

What I think Sandman is getting at is that often risk isn't discussed in a rational manner, because managers' (and security people's) egos, fears, ambitions, etc. get in the way. In a perfect Platonic world perhaps things wouldn't be that way, but in this one, people don't operate by reason alone, even when  they think they are doing so.

Outrage x Hazard may be a means to express risk within the context of the organization, but I like probability of loss event x probable magnitude of loss better for quantitative analysis.

Indeed, quantitative analysis is good. However, once you've got that analysis, you still have to sell it to management. And there's the rub: that last part is going to require dealing with emotion.