The part of your links that I find most interesting is the reference to Common Administration.

In my bookkeeping research, Common Administration is the precise issue a communication era must come to terms with. The problem is how to control a Common Administrative system. In essence, the corporate hierarchy produced mechanical goods and services. They used standard bookkeeping practices to create a network of distributed administration.

But as intellectually driven communication systems become a primary product focus, rather than the economic property of corporate America, management and administration reverse themselves. Management becomes distributed into a network and administration requires a heirarchy.

This paradigm shift is very confusing for people. One must return to the renaissance for a cultural shift of equal magnitude.

Distributed management tends to adopt unique administrative language.

Administration then loses its power to communicate out into the network. The solution is to centralize administation. In essence where mechanical industry used hierarchical management and network administration, communication systems reverse this need. They require distributed management and centralized administration. This, in essence, is the kernal of the paradigm shift from mechanical industry, that dominated our past, to intellectual communication, that will dominate our future.

What's more, where money -- the bottom line in the old management hierarchy -- was the medium of exchange controlling centrally managed systems, in distributed management with centralized administration, time becomes the primary medium of exchange. Time does not replace money, the two become complementary, but time becomes the primary control medium. So in essence the control system -- read bookkeeping -- of the future must manage time and administer money. This is the reverse of what corporate America was built upon. The essence of my bookkeeping goal is to demonstrate the validity of this argument, not because it is a good idea, but because it is the essential interpretation of what is going to happen whether we like it or not.

The Microsoft stuff is not my concern relative to the usefulness of your system. When the control medium shifts from money to time, context becomes a crucial feature of the system. When administration is centralized, privacy is at risk. The solution is a control system that is capable of partitioning information. This is not hard to do, but needs to be understood in the user community. Pattern study revolves around the issue of context, and is capable of handling the problem.

What I am looking for from Communication Metrics is some indication of its architecture that demonstrates the ability to place information into its properly controlled context--in other words, is it pattern savvy?--so that it can be addressed only by those people who have both the right and the need to know.

In network bookkeeping context specificity takes place is a system of pools that often have 6 or less members. In essence members share an account which holds data common to the group. This pattern system in bookkeeping, it seems to me, must be extended to the communication diary you are keeping.

But I don't know how to talk to you about it in detail because I don't know how your system is structured.

Things are going well. My computer mother board failed and so I was out of communication for a week; therefore, my slow reply.

Sincerely,

Dan

Copy to:

1. jcservo jcservo@dawnbreaker.com

2. Nerlove, Sara B snerlove@nsf.gov