Doc Searls at the Ethos Roundtable on November 18th

Please join us for our November session!

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008
4:30 - 6:00 pm
Charles Hotel
1 Bennett Street
Harvard Square, Cambridge
Featured guest: Doc Searls, Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and author of "Doc Searls Weblog"

Doc Searls is a fellow with both the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Center for Information Technology & Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a business bestseller, and Senior Editor at Linux Journal, where he has been covering open source development since the mid-90s. He is also one of the world's best known and widely read bloggers.

In "The World is Flat," Tom Friedman calls Doc "one of the most respected technology writers in America." J.D. Lasica, author of "Darknet," calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." In 2005, Doc won the Google O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator.

Here's the word from Doc about the topic for our session:

The Intention Economy: What happens when free customers prove more valuable than captive ones.

Are you tired of carrying around "loyalty cards" for retailers who speak to themselves about "acquiring," "owning" and "controlling" their "relationship" with you? -- and do little more than clog your wallet and slow down checkout lines?

Are you tired of login and password hell? In the everyday world you don't have to become a "member" of a store to shop there, or to click "accept" after not reading "agreements" that are anything but.

Wouldn't it be cool to rent exactly the car you want (for example, one that seats six and has an AUX input for your iPhone), rather than whatever the rental car agency decides to give you?

If you answer Yes to any of those questions, you should know about VRM, for Vendor Relationship Management. It's how we manage them at least as well as they manage us.

VRM tools are being developed right now by a community of developers and other volunteers, organized around ProjectVRM at Harvard's Berkman Center and led by Doc Searls, the originator of the VRM concept and a fellow at the center.

Here are a few web pages that he recommends that attendees read before the Ethos Roundtable session:

• Doc's essay "The Intention Economy"
• The VRM entry from Wikipedia
• A list of VRM principles:
• The ProjectVRM wiki
• The ProjectVRM blog
• Doc's blog

At the conclusion of our Ethos Roundtable session, we will stroll down the hall to enjoy the good company, food, and drink at the 501 Tech Club that is so generously underwritten by TechFoundation. The 501 Tech Club is the monthly gathering of technology professionals who work with nonprofit organizations.

All Ethos Roundtable attendees are welcome at the Boston 501 Tech Club, and vice versa.

Please remember that there's never any need to make a reservation to attend Ethos Roundtable events. Just come if you can, and feel free to invite others! However, if you're planning to attend the Boston 501 Tech Club event at 6:00 pm, we ask that you send an email to Kathleen Sherwin of TechFoundation (ksherwin AT techfoundation DOT org). Since TechFoundation is providing the free food and drink, it's courteous to let them know how much to order.

See you in November!