So What Is This "Dendrite Network" Anyway?

The basic idea is pretty simple, but the ramifications are pretty intense.

It's a little bit like an MLM business and a little bit like an Affiliate Network, but it's also a little bit like Twitter, or Stumbleupon.

Let me start by pointing out some aspects that are important but not part of the main thrust of the network:

First, the entire system will be run on an "open books" basis, meaning that all income and expenses of the business will be open to the users and the public.

You'll be able to watch us operate.

Second, I am not running this business to make a profit (although I have no doubt that it will make a lot of money.) I'm running this business to help people, so after all expenses and payroll are met any excess profit will be disbursed back to the network in creative ways. (Grants, zero-interest loans, scholarships, gifts, etc...)

Third, although there is a strong financial component to the network, it is intended primarily as a means of information exchange and collaborative thought. I originally called it the "Automatic Single-In Many-Out Propagation Network". (Now "Dendrite Network" doesn't sound so unwieldy, does it?)

Okay, now let me describe a few important ways that this Dendrite Network differs from an MLM program:

There is no central product or product line. This is a service to help you promote and sell your product or service.

There is no centralized hierarchy. (In MLM terms, your "upline" is also your "downline" and vice-versa.) Sales and information travel from node to node (that's you bub) in all directions. There's no center to the network. The company administers the system but does not sell a product "into" it.

Put another way, I don't give myself a privileged position in the network. If I want to profit from it I will simply sell my own services (I'm a computer programmer) to the network.

You're not expected to rack up "recruits". I expect most people using it to communicate with, on average, around twelve to twenty-five other people, and for that group to remain relatively stable.

There is no cost to participate and no required purchases. You can join the network as a vendor or just participant and not make any purchases. It's perfectly alright to earn money from the network simply for facilitating other peoples' connections to each other.

It's too soon to know how well the network will function to provide income to non-vendor participants but it is part of my dream for this that people will be able to make significant changes in their lives through participating.

So, how does it work?

Let's break it down by the three different "roles" a user can play: vendor, customer, and participant.

Everyone is a participant. You receive "packets" of information from your immediate group of contacts. These packets talk about some offer or other (hopefully not too spammy) news about interesting things on the internet. The packets could be tweets, SMS text messages, emails, etc...

You, as a participant, take a moment to review each packet (like reading your Twitter feed or something) and you have the option of:

• Rejecting it. If you don't like it for any reason you can tell both the person who forwarded it to you and the original vendor who created the offer.
• Forwarding it. This is the default action. If you find nothing objectionable in the message, you pass it along to the other members of your immediate group of contacts who haven't seen it yet.
• Accepting it. It turns out this message was for YOU! You engage with the offer. Make a purchase, sign a petition, donate to find a cure for breast cancer, whatever worthy cause or pleasure you have found.  "HOORAY! The system works!"

So that's the "cycle" for a normal user or "Participant". You get interesting offers (and if they're not interesting you can belly-ache about it!) and you pass them along to your immediate group of contacts.

When you see something you like you purchase it (or otherwise engage with it) and become a customer. Nothing shocking there.

Now let's examine what happens for a vendor.

In order to be a vendor you have to first agree to live up to certain simple standards, mostly involving promising to operate in good faith and not abuse the system. (I'll write up those standards in another blog post soon.)

Next, to create an offer, you need a product and you need to pick a retail price and a margin for that product. We'll have to see how it goes, but I expect margins of between 5% and 50% to be common.

When a sale is made through the Dendrite Network, you take the retail price minus the margin amount.  The margin is divided between the (up to) six participants in the chain of connections between you and your new customer.

If there are more than six people connecting you to your customer then the six "closest" to the customer get the margin.  If there are less than six people connecting you to your customer then the Dendrite Network keeps the extra portions, which is the only way that we (the company that administers the network) make money. (And remember, any extra money over operating costs are "recycled" back into the system.)

That's the core concept: everyone passes information back and forth; up to six people who facilitate a sale collect a portion of the retail price of the sale.

There are a ton of implications!

Service First, Profit as a Side-Effect

My primary goal in business is service, and that takes two forms.

First, you take good care of your customers, treat them fairly and well, and you "go the extra mile" to make sure their experience with you is a good one.

Second, I believe that you should be in business to provide value to your customers.

I know there are a lot of businesses and even whole industries we could talk about that are exploitative, that make a buck on some sort of gradient or scarcity rather than providing value, but I don't really feel that those are worthy of my time and energy to pursue personally.

In my mind, in order to deserve to be in business and be successful, you should be concerned first and foremost with providing value to your customers.

A long time ago, when I was a young man and trying to figure out my path in life, I read something in the Whole Earth Catalog by J. Baldwin about Bucky Fuller and how he had dedicated his live to "advantaging all World-around humanity while disadvantaging no one" that really stuck with me.

Baldwin said something to the effect of (I'm paraphrasing here): "Look around for that important, valuable task that all the world needs doing and that only you can do, and do it, and you'll never have to worry about 'earning a living'."

It struck me as a truly wise way to operate (of course I was just a dumb teenager, so I could have been naive...)

The interesting thing about that plan was that even if you fail completely, you'll still have had a better time of it than someone who picks the straight-and-narrow path.

And, in my life at least, it has been a good way to operate.

There are so many ways to make a buck in this world, but there is only one YOU and your deepest, most personal dream is also the most profound way to contribute back to the whole world.

Be brave and stay awake!

"Truth is One, though the sages know it variously."

You know how an orchestra sounds when they're tuning up?

The different sections and players are tuning their instruments and the overall sound is unmelodious and confused.  It's not quite unpleasant but it's not music.

Eventually they settle down and prepare to play together and when they begin each section and player has their own part to play that contributes to the whole.

I view the different religions as the various sections in an orchestra.

So far in history everyone has been tuning up and the resulting cacophony has assaulted our reason and feelings for centuries.

I think very soon the younger folk (and the more open-of-heart older folk) of all the religions will begin to reject the mutual exclusivity of their traditions and live up to the universal love and peace expressed in and central to all of them.

What a wonderful music that would be.

Honest Business and Open Books

One of my favorite business books is "Honest Business" by Michael Phillips and Salli Rasberry. It's an oldie-but-goodie from the hippy days here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In it the authors espouse a radical idea of open and transparent business that sets economic activity into a healthy and integrated harmony with the greater social and natural systems within which it operates.

I've always wanted to found a company that would include the Honest Business philosophy as part of its core "DNA".

With the Dendrite Network I have my chance. All of our own books will be open to our members, customers and vendors both, and even to the public and our competitors. Experiment and feedback will determine the limits, but I also want users' transactions to be public (or quasi-public) as well, to build openness, trust, and honesty.

Time to Make a Meta-Brain

I've sort-of launched my old/new project, the Dendrite Network (http://dendritenetwork.com/) which is partially a huge neural network with people as the nodes.  The other part is a get-rich-quick scheme.

No, not really.

The idea is complex and doesn't fit into an "elevator pitch" but it is meant to help the transition to a "Star-Trek"-style golden age happen smoothly.

Model Driven Development with PyModel

A taste of the possibilities of the Model-Driven milieu.

This is a graph of a simple interaction involving one user sending emails to our app to sign up for some service.

Once the system is initialized (1), it receives an email and marks that sender as 'pending' (2) and then it receives a second email and marks them as 'active' (3). The model glosses over handling things like errors, timeouts, cancellations, replies sent from the server, etc., in order to make it easier to understand the model composition we do next, but we can expand the model to handle them,


click here for full image

That's pretty simple, but now think about trying to test that your app can handle more than one user signing up at the same time. There are several ways in which even just two users can interact with the above process.

Using the PyModel tools we can compose the following tiny piece of code with the EmailSignupModel model to add a second user to the composed model.


import EmailSignupModel
EmailSignupModel.users.append('OleBrumm')


The PyModel tools can then automatically generate this model:


click here for full image

Take a close look at that image and follow some of the paths through the graph. You'll find that each path through the graph corresponds to one possible sequence of interactions of the above simple process with two users.


You can use the generated graph to test that your application can, in fact, handle more than one person using it at the same time.

Automating "Lean Startups"

Recently I've been learning about something called "Lean Startups", which is an extension of the "Lean Manufacturing" concepts from physical production to software production.

"Lean Manufacturing" derives from the famous Toyota Production System (and see also Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints" et. al.)

Steve Blank, Eric Ries

There's a very interesting guy named Steve Blank who has a student named Eric Ries who, as far as I know, is the person who first came up with the concept of "Lean Startup".

Ries has done a lot of talks (check out the video linked from this blog post) describing the "origin story" of the "Lean Startup" concept.

They tend to be a little sparse on the details of exactly what and how Reis' company, IWVU, does to implement the ideas, but one Timothy Fitz, employee at IMVU, describes their outrageous Continuous Deployment strategy in a post on his blog.

Steve Blank is no slouch either. Check out his "Customer Development Model".

Blank stresses, among other things, that business decisions should be made on the basis of verified facts rather than the opinions (I would call them hallucinations after the NLP usage) of the people in the company. They advocate a quasi-scientific approach of creating formal hypotheses and actually testing them out, as well as developing explicit feedback mechanisms and metrics to make sure things are happening like you think they are (and that when they're not, you know about it ASAP.)

Algorithm for Flushing Out Hypotheses

There's an interesting tool called Cucumber for "Outside-In" Behavior Driven Development (BDD) that has potential for use in "Lean Startup". You can watch a video of a presentation given by Ben Mabey that demonstrates it.

You create "feature descriptions" in a form that can be "run" by Cucumber something like unittests. The term "Outside-In" refers to the idea that these features should be tied to business values (i.e. increasing revenue, reducing cost, increasing value to your customers, etc...) before being implemented. Instead of writing the code first and then hoping it will deliver something of value to you and your customers, you write the "value" first and then write only the code necessary to implement it.

In order to tie features to business value the BDD folks recommend something they call "popping the why stack". You take a feature and ask "why are we implementing this?" and then you take the answer to that and repeat the process. You continue to ask "why?" until you've found a chain of reasoning that terminates in one or more business values. The Cucumber wiki page has an IRC transcript that is an excellent example of "popping the why stack".

If you go read that transcript now, you'll notice that each answer to the question "why?" is just such a business value hypothesis as Steve Blank and Eric Reis tell you to elucidate.

"Popping the why stack" leads directly to explicit testable assumptions about how you intend to get business value from your software.

Beyond Business Value

"Popping the why stack" can be considered a subset of something called the Core Transformation Process.

This is an NLP psychological algorithm developed by Connirae Andreas that starts with a problem or issue you're having and, through "eliciting the outcome chain" driving it, transforms it into an experience of the Divine.

I have used the Core Transformation Process on myself and others, and I can attest that the results are deep and profound.

In essence you suss out your "meta-intentions" for your behavior by asking, "What do you want, through having that, that's even more important?", which is a specifically crafted way to ask "why?", and then for each answer you repeat the question.

After about five to seven iterations you reach an incredibly profound "Core State" that can be described variously as "Oneness", "Bliss", "Unity"...

The universality of the results of this process imply that everything we do has, as its ultimate aim and motivation, the same beautiful and harmonious goal. In the courses of our lives this ultimate motivator gets "sidetracked" or redirected into more or less effective strategies for achieving "sub-goals".

I urge you, in removing waste from your processes and improving your effectiveness via real-world feedback, do not limit yourself to seeking value just in your business. Seek the deeper reason.

Live and be well.

For more on the Core Transformation Process I recommend this interview with Tamara Andreas (Connirae Andreas' sister and a teach of the process) and this excellent history of the development of the process.