Evolvability

Andrew Turner quoted me yesterday. The missing context of the quote, which I've linked to several times, is Clay Shirky's essay in praise of evolvable systems, in particular this bit:

HTTP and HTML are the Whoopee Cushion and Joy Buzzer of Internet protocols, only comprehensible as elaborate practical jokes. For anyone who has tried to accomplish anything serious on the Web, it's pretty obvious that of the various implementations of a worldwide hypertext protocol, we have the worst one possible.

Except, of course, for all the others.

You must read it if you haven't already. It's every bit as relevant for today's discussion of the "GeoWeb" as it was for the discussion of the web in 1996.

I'm surprised and disappointed that so much of the discussion at the GeoWeb conference seemed to be stuck on "top-down vs bottom-up" or "80 percent vs 20 percent" or "B2B vs B2C". Of these, the first is the closest approximation of a serious discussion about the nature of the "GeoWeb": is it to be an open, evolvable and therefore always incomplete system, one that demands and rewards innovation -- or is it to be a entire, fixed, thoroughly standardized and unsurprising system? The other two debates are bogus. "'Tastes great' vs 'less filling'".