ProjectVRM is a development and research project launched by Doc Searls in 2006 at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, in the first of his four years as a fellow there. The BKC still kindly hosts the project’s wiki and mailing list.

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management and is meant to serve as the customer-side counterpart of Customer Relationship Management, the $.X trillion business* by which companies attempt (and mostly fail) to relate to customers. The project has two purposes:

  1. To encourage the development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations—especially in commercial marketplaces. After this project got underway, we started calling these tools first person technologies.
  2. To encourage and conduct research on VRM-related theories, usage of VRM tools, and effects as adoption of VRM tools takes place.

Since its start, the VRM community has grown to include many development projects, companies, allied associations, and people. The community’s work is outlined in the project wiki, and discussed on its mailing list, in the blog portion of this site, and workshops and other events, most notably at IIW: the Internet Identity Workshop, a twice-yearly unconference at the Computer History Museum. (Doc has co-organized IIW since it began in 2005.) Every IIW is preceded at the CHM by a VRM Day workshop.

Doc sees VRM as “a way to fulfill one of the promises of The Cluetrain Manifiesto“—the widely-cited website and book, both written in 1999 by Doc and three other authors (one of whom is David Weinberger, a fellow alumnus fellow of the Berkman Klein Center). That promise was embodied in this statement, written by Christopher Locke:

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Implicit in that “one clue” is a thesis: that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves and to the marketplace. ProjectVRM knows that customer reach will only exceed vendor grasp when customers acquire tools for the job and prove that thesis true. Encouraging the development of those tools has been ProjectVRM’s primary work since the project began.

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*The CRM industry consists of software and services and goes by other names, such as CX (for Customer Experience). It also includes call centers and other ways companies relate to customers. Since the growth rate for CRM software alone is expected to be $176.83 billion by 2030, expressing the industry’s size as a percentage of $trillion makes sense.

The photo at the top of the blog was taken in July 2011 at the Rialto Mercado in Venice, one of the world’s oldest and most famous markets. It is where Marco Polo worked, and the setting for Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.