"Out in the real world if I share something with a mailing list or one or more email correspondents the gesture presumes that they will be interested. Hopefully they will be grateful. If they aren’t grateful, one hopes they will give a moment to the question – why did he share this? Sharing isn’t a gift. It has aspects of reciprocity, power, and selfishness embedded in it. At this point I’m reminded of the sarcastic cliche “thanks for sharing.”

All of this is entangled in the nature of the relationship you have with the audience.

When I post in my blog, or on twitter, or (rarely) on Facebook the nature of the gesture is entirely different than sending an email because I do not pick the audience. My audience has volunteered to listen to my mumblings. In this case the sharing moves closer to being a gift. I write and you all can pick and choose as you please. I don’t expect much. I don’t expect you to read. I don’t expect you to respond""This helps to explain why I seem to cringe when people use the word “conversation” in the context of blogging etc. al. There are norms in conversation. For example, it is impolite to ignore your partner in a conversation. In blogging, twittering, etc. the norm is to ignore."

"Gift economies have a place in software lore. Eric Raymond used them to explain how open source works. Corey Doctorow built a non-monetary economy in his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

My reading is that neither one of these are normal gift economies. Doctorow’s “whuffie” has the essential properties of money: it is quantifiable, you can lose it, and you must be concerned about whether the books balance."

"The product owner is breaking the tacit agreement that a boundary object requires. Not only must the team justify their request, not only must they justify it in terms of business value, they must also adopt the product owner’s definition of business value. This, I think, is an act of, well, cultural imperialism. Not only must we be useful and productive, we must be useful and productive for the right reasons. Not only must we do the right thing, we must believe the right way.

This insistence on goodthink is related to the scorn toward the stance of reaction I claimed earlier. The team cannot be a black box operating according to its own rules; it must have a visible interior that operates correctly.

I’ve done precious little reading in colonialism, but all this reminds me of the attitude of colonialist rulers towards the colonized: they must be remade. For that reason, I think learning about the strategies the colonized used to preserve their culture might be useful to us in Agile."

Interesting but innocuous HBR commentary on stuff we've actually all been doing for a while out here in the world

"J. Doe probably could have afforded to send $250 or $2,500. But J. Doe sent $25. ...entirely because I set the price of POPFile at $0. It's free. Donations are purely altruistic. J. Doe got nothing more from me than anyone else who's emailed me about POPFile over the years. And J. Doe even understood that he'd got a large amount of value from POPFile. If you choose to do donation-ware you need to realize that almost no one donates. You are making a choice to give away your software and need to treat every donation as what it is: an unexpected gift. If you want to make a living forget about donations and sell your software. Sell support for your software. Make it your living. If I really wanted to get J. Doe's money I could have made POPFile closed source, I could have gone and sold the product. I could have made the case for how much saving that email address was worth and I could have charged J. Doe a lot more than $25. But that's a whole different ball game; that's business."

"You don't ask, you just give."