Defrag Blog

People asked for it, and here it is - the Defrag soundtrack:

Yes, we’re working on the Sons of Defrag t-shirts

Sometimes the stuff that happens “behind the scenes” of Defrag is really worth sharing. What follows is the email that Paul Kedrosky sent to his panel participants today (posted with permission). Enjoy:

Folks -

Good to e-meet you all.

For our session we’re going to have some fun next week by having a sprightly discussion about the news. If you’ve watched Around the Horn on ESPN, you’ll have the idea. I’m going to toss something out, probably loudly and insultingly to someone or something, and then we’ll all run to positions as far apart from anything defensible as we can, and commence the sparring and witty repartee.

Some sample topics:
- Twitter has proven that revenue is bad for valuation. What are you doing to make your revenue model more mysterious? What advice would you give Dick?

- Venture capitalists are people who wanted to be bankers, but lacked the personality. Discuss. Be sure to use examples. Extra points if they live in Colorado, or are named “Lindzon”.

- If you have a pre-money valuation of $4m, then $1m invested, but a 15% ESOP, what is the real pre-money of your venture? Extra points for converting to euros.

I’ll also touch on some stuff in the general news too, like the 60 Minutes story this weekend about how hackers tried to blow up Brazil’s electrical grid.

At the end of it all I’ll completely arbitrarily award the Kedrosky Prize (Award?) to the person who made me laugh the most toward the end the session. Yes, my memory is that bad.

Look forward to it.

P.

A caveat on this post: I hesitated to write this - mostly because I think it’s very easy for the author (me) to cross a line of being provocative for provocative-ness’ sake, and for readers/commenters (you) to misinterpret my meaning here. Please be gentle.

There were a few tweets flying around at JiveWorld last week about how social software is all about “inclusion.” I want to push back on that a bit. Mostly, because I think social software, insofar as it’s about community formation has, as it’s first act (and I’ll explain this a bit), *exclusion*.

I think it’s pretty commonly accepted in sociological circles that “communities” (ie, groups) form via an act of exclusion. That is to say that all groups define “us” as against something else (”them”) by necessity. Even in the case where a “group” tries to explicitly eschew this implicit act of exclusion, the very act of doing so (saying “we are defined by NOT being exclusionary”) is an exclusionary act.

This, of course, leaves a bit of a bad taste in people’s collective mouths. And rightfully so. None of us *wants* to be exclusionary, as our collective histories include so many atrocities and bad acts based upon severe acts of exclusion.

That said, when I heard the “social software is an inclusionary act” meme surface, my gut revolted. And for a reason. It’s simply not true. The first defining act of community is, by definition, exclusionary. This is not to say that communities can’t be “open,” only that there’s always a “them” for our “us.”

So, the next time you hear “social software” - remember, “social” often means community, and community necessarily operates via mechanisms of exclusion.

The same holds true of conferences. Conferences are exclusionary vehicles. Even unconferences - much as they’d like to be inclusionary are exclusionary (just by nature of the fact that some people aren’t there). Attendees at conferences implicitly form a community. In fact, some conferences are so conspicuous in their exclusionary practices as to be “off the record” and “invite only” (The Lobby, for instance). And the highest end tech conferences have an air of real exclusion (D and the Web2.0 Summit come to mind).

So, my friends, won’t you join our community? Everyone is welcome, but if you don’t attend, you really won’t be part of the community.