Digital ID Coach

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future, history, records, tools banking, data, finance, Identity, iiw, iiw xiii, Microformat, Open standard, self-determination, Standards, Technology/Internet, World Wide Web

Customer Commons

October 19th, 2011

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Click me for full cartoon

Earlier this week, several of us met to talk about developing a non-hierarchical, scalable organization called Customer Commons. The working ideas/hypotheses include:

This is a community of individuals that buy stuff (customers),
it receives its funding only from customers, and
the organization serves the collective interests and aspirations of those customers.

You’ve likely heard of Creative Commons (offers alternative copyright choices for publication of your work), Consumer’s Union (addresses the information asymmetry between consumers and companies, but reifies the old constraints), Common Cause, and other “commona” related interests that help bridge the gap between abundance and scarcity. However, there’s a need for an organization that represents the customers.

A few rough notes from the meeting:

Process: problem definition, validate possible solutions for your market, then build. No a priori structure. Customer discovery, customer validation (confirming that they’ll pay for your solution), customer creation, company building. Joe will arrange a series of conference calls based on Four Steps of the Epiphany (45 pages) to discuss a process for building this organization. (Let me know if you’d like to join us!) This process/movement/organization will “roll out like the web” in the sense that everyone is exploring a market place/need.

Organizational aspect: Organization should be in the same vein as what we’re trying to create with VRM, not a hierarchy. What is it that is unique/needs to do that nobody else does?

Product hypothesis: what problem must we solve to adhere our mission and change the world?

VIP access to beta products that are VRMy
Support development of rights frameworks that are VRMy
Building moral/political/economic force
membership
legal education
magazine/publications
tools
seed funding for VRM tech
Participation in the conversation that is reframing the market
Develop/grow the “customer interaction protocol”

Customer hypothesis:

We are the 100% (eventually)
We are intentful

Process: idea – discussion understanding – agreement – movement – ubiquity

Three “might be viral” points: 1) is edge driven, 2) is VRMy like our projects, 3) says “emperor wears no clothes” (reflects common values).

More work will be done in the coming weeks.

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future, records, tools Consumer's Union, Creative Commons, customer, emperor, Epiphany, interests, possible solutions, representation, self-determination

Eben Moglen’s FreedomBox

February 18th, 2011

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Lawyer and Professor Eben Moglen gave a fascinating talk at the Internet Society’s New York Chapter recently. Here’s an audio link to that hour-long talk, Freedom in the Cloud (mp3). There are additional links (to the Q&A, several video formats, and more) on this ISOC-NY page, and a transcript here.

In this talk, Moglen points out that a tremendous amount of information about us is already on the net, and that we are DEcreasingly in control of that information–and all that it might infer to others. The server and client architecture of today is all about placing the power in the hands of a few, and reducing transparency about what happens to that information. This situation results in misuse of the most viral, anti-social kind.

There are a lot of reasons for making clients dis-empowered and there are even more reasons for dis-empowering the people who own the clients and who might quaintly be thought of the people who ought to control them. If you think for just a moment how many people have an interest in dis-empowering the clients that are the mobile telephones you will see what I mean. There are many overlapping rights owners as they think of themselves each of whom has a stake in dis-empowering a client at the edge of the network to prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another. To prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the great monopoly of music in the sky. To disable competing video delivery services in new chips I founded myself that won’t run popular video standards, good or bad. There are a lot of business models that are based around mucking with the control over client hardware and software at the edge to deprive the human that has quaintly thought that she purchased it from actually occupying the position that capitalism says owners are always in – that is, of total control.

… In fact, what we have are things we call platforms. The word “platform” like the word “cloud” doesn’t inherently mean anything. It’s thrown around a lot in business talk. But, basically what platform means is places you can’t leave. Stuff you’re stuck to. Things that don’t let you off. That’s platforms. And the Net, once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.

Moglen calls these businesses “the new enterprises of unfreedom,” and points out that these people claim “that software as a service is becoming the way of the world.” Moglen continues, “Freedom still matters … Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.”

Convenience is merely the choice of one tool over another. Moglen proposes that a person-friendly solution can and should be developed, and the technology (hardware and software) is in front of us. Toward that end, he and others have formed The FreedomBox Foundation to create a simple little server that will do just what we need, without any of the free spying that our hosting and social services now demand.

We don’t have to live in the catastrophe. It’s not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.

Coaching moment: The goals of this organization are laudable:

safe social networking,
secure back-up of your data,
home network security,
encrypted email and phone services,
and more.

He’s also proposing this as an affordable, portable device–something like a wall wart (those big plugs that come with some of your external hardware). Amazing, isn’t it?

If such a device were available, would you buy one and use it? Why or why not?

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future, records, tools 4th Amendment, business, client hardware, cloud computing, Computer software, Computing platform, Eben Moglen, Fourth Amendment, Free software, freedom, Internet Society's New York Chapter, Lawyer and Professor, NYU, Open source software, self-determination, server, Software as a service, Software licenses, Technology/Internet

Identity as Revealed

February 18th, 2011

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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.

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future, history, records, tools business, Communication, Computing, dependent web, Human-computer interaction, Hypertext, Identity, John Battelle, personal data cloud, personal data store, self-determination, Technology/Internet, user-driven, Web algorithms

Platform vs Relationships

February 15th, 2011

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A little while ago, Scott Adams wrote his thoughts about FutureMe and how it might become a Facebook killer. Adams pointed out that information about our past–what we’ve already done–is useful, but less so than what we’re looking to do in the future. He suggests a new fourth party (user-driven) service:

The interface for Futureme is essentially a calendar, much like Outlook. But it would include extra layers for hopes and goals that don’t have specific dates attached.

For every entry to your Futureme calendar, you specify who can see it, including advertisers. If you allow advertisers a glimpse of a specific plan, it would be strictly anonymous. Advertisers could then feed you ads specific to your plan, while not knowing who they sent it to. The Futureme service would be the intermediary.

Now imagine that you never have to see any of the incoming ads except by choice. If you plan to buy a truck in a month, you would need to click on that entry to see which local truck advertisements have been matched to your plans. This model turns advertising from a nuisance into a tool. You‘d never see an ad on Futureme that wasn’t relevant to your specific plans.

The biggest benefit of the system could come from your network of friends and business associates. Suppose you post on the system that you would like to see a Bon Jovi concert sometime in the next year. Now your friends – the ones you specify to see this specific plan – can decide if they want in on it. Maybe someone you know can get free tickets, and someone has a van and is willing to be the designated driver. Maybe someone has a contact that can get you backstage passes. By broadcasting your plan, you make it possible for others to improve your plan.

Conversely, if you plan to do something stupid, your contacts have time to talk you out of it or suggest a superior alternative.

The great thing about Adams’ plan is that it shows how our data and online presence can be user-driven–meaning we make choices about who gets to see what. Moreover, by identifying Futureme as an intermediary on the user side, Adams has described a fourth-party service. (I’m guessing that Adams is intending this to be on the user side, or it can’t really live up to the promise of being a “Facebook killer.” I don’t know of any way at this time to be a perfectly neutral intermediary, so he likely has to fall on one side or the other.)

Coaching moment: I’d like to point out a significant distinction here between platforms and relationships. Adams is apparently describing a platform for social interaction and commercial services. This is also the Facebook model. On Facebook, someone else (the shareholders of Facebook) owns your user data and service usage logs. Facebook is in control. As we’ve seen before, it’s one thing to set your privacy wishes, but if Facebook is calling the shots, the rules can be changed anytime. Moreover, you’re always under surveillance whether you knowingly agree to that or not.

Now consider the idea of personal data stores where you control your data in any way you wish, using software tools that you choose, on hardware that you own (or not), at any time or under circumstances that you want. Nobody gets access that you don’t authorize. Wouldn’t that be something?

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