Information Sharing Work Group, a group of Kantara Initiative, is working to develop a standard information sharing agreement. Slides are in progress, will be linked to when available.
Joe offered a quick intro to Information Sharing Agreements. The point of Information Sharing Agreements is to improve services for both individuals and organizations through the right data and the right time. Services need data to operate. Personal data is the most relevant, timely and quality data. This is what individuals bring to the table.
Criteria. Preferences. Requirements. Queries and Intention
Relationships and memberships
Age, Address and billing information
History: transactions and interactions.
Together, all of this comprises the digital context that people bring to their online experience.
If organizations can access this context, they can provide a bunch of interesting services and improve existing services. Read more…
In his blog post Identity and The Independent Web, author John Battelle explored the notion of an independent web and a dependent web. He describes:
The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.
The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are.
Note the key words “who the service believes you to be.” Battelle continues,
“In a Dependent Web model, the data and processes used to deliver results is opaque and out of the consumer’s control. What we see depends on how the site interprets pre-conceived models of identity it receives from a third party.”
This raises the significant question of who they think we are. They have a pretty distorted picture, given all of the many reasons and persons we sometimes represent. The problem is that increasingly there is no way to separate ourselves (as we wish to be seen) from “ourselves” (as they’ve’ defined us). Jumping to the end of Battelle’s intriguing post:
I think it’s worth defining a portion of the web as a place where one can visit and be part of a conversation without the data created by that conversation being presumptively sucked into a sophisticated response platform – whether that platform is Google, Blue Kai, Doubleclick, Twitter, or any other scaled web service. Now, I’m all for engaging with that platform, to be sure, but I’m also interested in the parts of society where one can wander about free of identity presumption, a place where one can chose to engage knowing that you are in control of how your identity is presented, and when it is revealed.
Coaching moment: Some people are very careful, and others are not at all, about what we search for and say on the net. In the end, it doesn’t matter as much as we might intend. We can’t track or make the same gross assumptions as the information industry is wont to do.
We don’t yet have the tools to shift this situation, but it won’t be long. Several companies are working on this–under names such as Personal Data Store and Personal Data Cloud. There will be a day in your future when, for example, you won’t have to change your home address on a lot of sites that deliver goods, services, or utilities to your home. You’ll change it once, in your personal data area, and the vendors you authorize will come to you for that update.
The information sharing industry is pretty opaque to most people. We have no idea what “they” know about us. Moreover, it can be infuriating when certain companies make assumptions about us that are clearly erroneous. It can be absolutely unnerving when total strangers strike a little too close to the bone.
It’s instructive to find out what they know! Several years ago (2006), my friends at Privacy Rights Clearinghouse wrote a post called For the New Year, Resolve to Check Yourself Out that will help you do this. Their list of resources will help you understand who you are from the perspectives of your:
Credit history
Medical Information
Bank account history
Insurance claims
Public records
Search engines
I’d add one point to their last bullet. If you have an account on Google, you can now go into your Google Account Settings (look for the link in the upper right corner to Settings). Under Personal Settings, look for Dashboard: View Data Stored with this Account. It’s a view of what Google knows about you.
Coaching moment: It can be both overwhelming and empowering to know this much about your world. Fortunately, the overwhelming feeling can be countered by putting the story together and taking control of the problems. You’re creating a story, a narrative of who you are. Fix your problems if you can. Imagine a world in which you controlled your own information and others came to you for it. That world might be highly customizable in ways that were unique to you. What would that look and feel like?
At this past IIW, I convened a session to ask if and how it might be possible to do a stateless distributed membership for a website. There are two main ideas behind this proposal. First, I don’t really NEED to have a membership database of my own. That is, I don’t need to have another place for you to create an account, user ID and password. We can use OpenID, Information Cards, or other technologies for authenticating and authorizing you. Second, if I want to move toward a world where you control your own data, I don’t need to maintain the database of your comments. I only need to know where your comments are stored so I can properly assemble things as needed. It’s convenient but not technically necessary to own and control all the bits myself.
My proposal for a Stateless Distributed Membership is a mouthful, so I’ll unpack it a bit. There are three parts: a membership, being stateless, and being distributed.
Membership
Let me start with the easy part. You probably understand the idea of membership as a group or association of people contributing to something like a conversation or project. They’re members of a group, or in my case, members of a conversation or project on my site. Nothing unusual about this idea.
Being Stateless
Next is the idea of being stateless. In computer science, the http protocol that you use to call a web page and associated resources is stateless because you call a page from the URL or a link in your browser, the server responds by sending the page, graphics, or whatever, then you see it. Each request is separate; there’s no need to stay connected to the servers. In my case, being “stateless” means that each transaction is independent. Eve Maler talks about a stateless identity in her post Both a data borrower and a data lender be:
This is a kind of data statelessness, in that when you tell various sites they can set, read, and republish your [information from your Personal Data Store], they’re letting go of any pretense of exclusive hosting control so that they can offer you a different kind of value.
Now, in the IdM and VRM worlds, some of us have been talking aboutidentity statelessness for a while, which is similar but looks more like straight data-sharing (reading) rather than arbitrary service access (setting).
For some reason this is a tougher sell — even though CRM systems and user accounts are shot through with pale copies of stale data (and, in the enterprise case, even though syncing directories and replicating databases is brittle and no fun).
Even when one party — say, you yourself — is authoritative for some piece of personal data (like your home address), all the sites insist on making you provision a copy of this data into their profile pages by hand and by value, and insist on thinking they own something truly valuable even after you move and forget to tell them.
The bottom line: if I don’t insist on “owning” your data, we both will realize more value from our trust and flexibility. It’s daring, and in the larger scheme of things, I believe it’s a Good Thing.
Distributed
Finally, the term distributed refers to the fact that all parts of the conversation or projects are stored elsewhere on the net. If you wish to add a comment to a conversation on my server, your comment is added to your personal datastore (wherever it is, and whatever form it might take). When you wish to read the conversation, my server compiles the contributions as needed.
In this model, I do need to maintain a database of where to find your comments and a way to authorize you as the person who granted permission for me to include them in the conversation on my website. But think of it: if you want to revoke permission for me to use your comments, you can. How revolutionary (and potentially messy) is that?
Furthermore, you may choose to log in using an identity that’s different from the last one you used. That works on my server. For example, you might wish to be a regular person contributing to most conversations, but if you’re a professional fundraiser and one of the threads is about raising funds for a non-profit, you may wish to disclose your work and position in that context. Your two identities describe different parts of your life, and you may have good reasons to keep those parts separate.
The IIW Session
In my session, I described this concept and asked what people thought about it. I offered three scenarios where people might interact. One of them: a conversation or forum where blog posts and trackbacks can help create a threaded conversation. The session is an hour-long exploration and discovery of the possibilities. If you have questions or can add a piece to this puzzle, I’d love to hear from you.
My heartfelt thanks go to the people with whom I’ve spoken about this, including =JeffH, Eve, the guy at the end of the video talking with me about trackbacks (I’m sorry I can’t find your name), several others who made great suggestions and shared ideas at my session, and Joe, who spent considerable time exploring underlying frameworks with me.
Coaching moment: You probably have more than one account online, and have likely cursed the problem of forgetting user names and passwords. You may have wished that the picture of you holding a beer wasn’t online for your boss to see. Maybe you’ve been spooked by an advertisement for something that you really didn’t want. If you could do things differently, what would you do? How do you handle your accounts now? Do you feel secure about your online practices? Do you even want to be in control? Not everyone does.
This year I’ve been scrambling between sessions that start and end with no break in between. Many of the videos are missing the first few minutes; the whole of the sessions are here. I’ll be uploading these over the next couple of days as my net access is severely constrained. One might reasonably think that the Computer History Museum–in the heart of Silicon Valley–would have good wireless connectivity, but I’ve seen too many jokes about their connecting a 300 baud modem to the wireless router. After all, it is history.
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