Category: Events (Page 2 of 6)

IoT & IoM next week at IIW

February 28, 2016 / / 1 Comment

blockchain1

(This post was updated and given a new headline on 20 April 2016.)

In  The Compuserve of Things, Phil Windley issues this call to action:

On the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980’s, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things?

In other words, an Internet of Me (#IoM) and My Things. Meaning things we own that belong to us, under our control, and not puppeted by giant companies using them to snarf up data about our lives. Which is the  #IoT status quo today.

A great place to work on that is  IIW— the Internet Identity Workshop , which takes place next Tuesday-Thursday, April 26-28,  at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Phil and I co-organize it with Kaliya Hamlin.

To be discussed, among other things, is personal privacy, secured in distributed and crypto-secured sovereign personal spaces on your personal devices. Possibly using blockchains, or approaches like it.

So here is a list of some topics, code bases and approaches I’d love to see pushed forward at IIW:

  • OneName is “blockchain identity.”
  • Blockstack is a “decentralized DNS for blockchain applications” that “gives you fast, secure, and easy-to-use DNS, PKI, and identity management on the blockchain.” More: “When you run a Blockstack node, you join this network, which is more secure by design than traditional DNS systems and identity systems. This  is because the system’s registry and its records are secured by an underlying blockchain, which is extremely resilient against tampering and control. In the registry that makes up Blockstack, each of the names has an owner, represented by a cryptographic keypair, and is associated with instructions for how DNS resolvers and other software should resolve the name.” Here’s the academic paper explaining it.
  • The Blockstack Community is “a group of blockchain companies and nonprofits coming together to define and develop a set of software protocols and tools to serve as a common backend for blockchain-powered decentralized applications.” Pull quote: “For example, a developer could use Blockstack to develop a new web architecture which uses Blockstack to host and name websites, decentralizing web publishing and circumventing the traditional DNS and web hosting systems. Similarly, an application could be developed which uses Blockstack to host media files and provide a way to tag them with attribution information so they’re easy to find and link together, creating a decentralized alternative to popular video streaming or image sharing websites. These examples help to demonstrate the powerful potential of Blockstack to fundamentally change the way modern applications are built by removing the need for a “trusted third party” to host applications, and by giving users more control.” More here.
  • IPFS (short for InterPlanetary File System) is a “peer to peer hypermedia protocol” that “enables the creation of completely distributed applications.”
  • OpenBazaar is “an open peer to peer marketplace.” How it works: “you download and install a program on your computer that directly connects you to other people looking to buy and sell goods and services with you.” More here and here.
  • Mediachain, from Mine, has this goal: “to unbundle identity & distribution.” More here and here.
  • telehash is “a lightweight interoperable protocol with strong encryption to enable mesh networking across multiple transports and platforms,” from @Jeremie Miller and other friends who gave us jabber/xmpp.
  • Etherium is “a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.”
  • Keybase is a way to “get a public key, safely, starting just with someone’s social media username(s).”
  • ____________ (your project here — tell me by mail or in the comments and I’ll add it)

In tweet-speak, that would be @BlockstackOrg, @IPFS, @OpenBazaar, @OneName, @Telehash, @Mine_Labs #Mediachain, and @IBMIVB #ADEPT

On the big company side, dig what IBM’s Institute for Business Value  is doing with “empowering the edge.” While you’re there, download Empowering the edge: Practical insights on a decentralized Internet of Things. Also go to Device Democracy: Saving the Future of the Internet of Things — and then download the paper by the same name, which includes this graphic here:

ibm-pyramid

Put personal autonomy in that top triangle and you’ll have a fine model for VRM development as well. (It’s also nice to see Why we need first person technologies on the Net , published here in 2014, sourced in that same paper.)

Ideally, we would have people from all the projects above at IIW. For those not already familiar with it, IIW is a three-day unconference, meaning it’s all breakouts, with topics chosen by participants, entirely for the purpose of getting like-minded do-ers together to move their work forward. IIW has been doing that for many causes and projects since the first one, in 2005.

Register for IIW here: https://iiw22.eventbrite.com/.

Also register, if you can, for VRM Day: https://vrmday2016a.eventbrite.com/. That’s when we prep for the next three days at IIW. The main focus for this VRM Day is here.

Bonus link: David Siegel‘s Decentralization.

 

 

 

VRM Day and IIW XX

March 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The most important weeks on the VRM calendar are those when IIW — the Internet Identity Workshop — takes place. There are two per year, in Spring and Fall, and they are hosted by Kaliya Hamlin,  Phil Windley and myself at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

The next is April 7-9. Leading into it is VRM Day, which is on April 6.

IIW is an unconference, which means there are no speakers or panels, and sponsors (which we appreciate hugely) just cover our meals, snacks and barista. All the topics of the workshop are vetted and posted the start of each of IIW’s three days, and every topic is discussed in breakout sessions spread across the venue’s many rooms and tables.

IIW is ideal for pushing topics and dev work forward. VRM has many topics, of course: intentcasting, personal data management (aka clouds, vaults, lockers, stores, services, etc.), VRM-meets-CRM (including CX, CE and other two- and three-letter acronyms), IoT, intelligent assistants, the Indie Web (and indie everything), emerging and wannabe standards and shared code bases, and all the other kinds of things listed on the ProjectVRM wiki development page.

This next one will be our XXth. All of them are important, but this one will be especially so, because we will be sorting out how various VRM projects fit together, compete, support each other, and engage systems on the big vendor and enterprise side.

In fact that topic will be the main focus of VRM Day, where we will vet a VRM framework document based on a maturity model that will give everybody a way to show how far along they are in different development areas.

This is the document VRM developers will share with analysts, enterprises and big vendors who need to know how real VRM is becoming, and who plays what roles in the emerging market space.

Here is the link to register for VRM Day.

And here is the one for IIW XX.

Look forward to seeing you there.

The answer is #CFT: Clouds For Things

January 17, 2015 / / 5 Comments

My last post asked, How do you maximize the help that companies and customers give each other? My short answer is in the headline above. Let me explain.

The house where I’m a guest in London has clouds for all its appliances. All the clouds are physical. Here they are:

House cloud

Here is a closer look at some of them:

House cloud closeup

Each envelope contains installation and instruction manuals, warranty information and other useful stuff. For example, today I used an instruction manual to puzzle out what these symbols on the kitchen’s built-in microwave oven mean:

knob

Now let’s say I didn’t have the directions handy. How would I find them? Obviously, on the Web, right? I mean, you’d think.

So I went to the site of Atag, the oven’s maker.  From eyeballing the microwave, I gathered that the one in the kitchen is  this one: the Combi-Microwave MA4211B. On the Atag website I found it buried in Kitchen Appliances —> Collection —> Microwaves, where it might also be the MA4211A or MA4211T. Hard to tell. Directions for its use appeared to be under Quality and Service —> Visit ATAG Service Support. There I found this:

atagservice

When I clicked on “Download the User Manual,” I got this:

atagusermanual

For “type number” I guessed MA4211B, entered it in the search field and got this:

atagresults

I got the same results clicking on both:

atagdownloadchoice

Nothing actually downloaded, and the Acrobat Reader information was useless to me. So I clicked on “No.” That got me this:

atagfail

I then hit “I want to stop.” That looped me back to the search panel, three screenshots up from here.

In other words, a complete fail. Since the copyright notice is dated 2007 — eight years ago — I assume this fail is a fossil.

There are three reasons for this fail, and why its endemic to the entire service industry:

  1. The company bears the full burden of customer service.
  2. Every company serves customers differently.
  3. There is no single standard or normalized way for companies and customers to inform each other online.

What’s missing is a way to give customers scale — for the good of both themselves and the companies they deal with. Customers have scale with cash, credit cards, telephony, email and many other tools and systems. But not yet with a mechanism for connecting to any company and exchanging useful information in a standard way.

We’ve  been moving in that direction in the VRM development community, by working on personal data services, stores, lockers, vaults and clouds. Those are all important and essential efforts, but they have not yet converged around common standards, protocols and customer experiences. Hence, scale awaits. What this house models, with its easily-accessed envelopes for every appliance, is a kind of scale: a simple and standardized way of dealing with many different suppliers — a way that is the customer’s own.

Now let’s imagine a simple  digital container for each appliance’s information: its own cloud. In form and use, it would be as simple and standard as a file folder. It would arrive along with the product, belong to the customer*, and live in the customer’s own personal data service, store, locker, vault, cloud or old-fashioned hard drive.  Or, customers could create them for themselves, just like the owner of the house created those file folders for every appliance. Put on the Net, each appliance  would join the Internet of Things, without requiring any native intelligence on the things themselves.

There, on the Net, companies could send product updates and notifications directly into the clouds of each customer’s things. And customers could file suggestions for product improvements, along with occasional service requests.

This would make every product’s cloud a relationship platform: a conduit though which the long-held dreams of constant product improvement and maximized customer service can come true.

Neither of those dreams can come true as long as every product maker bears the full responsibility for intelligence gathering and customer support — and does those  differently than every other company. The only way they can come true is if the customers and their things have one set of standard ways to stay in touch and help each other. That’s what clouds for things will do. I see no other way.

So let’s get down to it, starting with a meme/hashtag representing Clouds For Things : #CFT.

Next, #VRM developers old and new need to gather around standard code, practices and protocols that can make #CFT take off.  Right now the big boys are sucking at that, building feudal fiefdoms that give us the AOL/Compuserve/Prodigy of things, rather than the Internet of Things.  For the whole story on this mess, read Bruce Sterling‘s e-book/essay The Epic Struggle for the Internet of Things, or the chunks of it at BoingBoing and in this piece I wrote here for Linux Journal.

We have a perfect venue for doing the Good Work required for both IoT and CFT — with IIW, which is coming up early this spring: 7-9 April. It’s an inexpensive unconference in the heart of Silicon Valley, with no speakers or panels. It’s all breakouts, where participants choose the topics and work gets done. Register here.

We also have a lot of thinking and working already underway. The best documented work, I believe, is by Phil Windley (who calls CFTs picos, for persistent compute objects). His operating system for picos is CloudOS. His holdings-forth on personal clouds are here. It’s all a good basis, but it doesn’t need to be the only one.

What matters is that #CFT is a $trillion market opportunity. Let’s grab it.

* I just added this, because I can see from Johannes Ernst’s post here that I didn’t make it clear enough.

 

 

 

 

 

Getting Respect

August 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Respect Network (@RespectConnect) is a new kind of corporate animal: a for-profit company that is also a collection of developers and other interested parties (including nonprofits) gathered around common goals and principles. Chief among the latter is OIX‘s Respect Trust Framework, which is “designed to be self-reinforcing through use of a peer-to-peer reputation system.” Every person and organization agreeing to the framework is a peer. Here are the five principles to which all members agree:

Promise We will respect each other’s digital boundaries

Every Member promises to respect the right of every other Member to control the Member Information they share within the network and the communications they receive within the network.
Permission We will negotiate with each other in good faith

As part of this promise, every Member agrees that all sharing of Member Information and sending of communications will be by permission, and to be honest and direct about the purpose(s) for which permission is sought.
Protection We will protect the identity and data entrusted to us

As part of this promise, every Member agrees to provide reasonable protection for the privacy and security of Member Information shared with that Member.
Portability We will support other Members’ freedom of movement

As part of this promise, every Member agrees that if it hosts Member Information on behalf of another Member, the right to possess, access, control, and share the hosted information, including the right to move it to another host, belongs to the hosted Member.
Proof We will reasonably cooperate for the good of all Members

As part of this promise, every Member agrees to share the reputation metadata necessary for the health of the network, including feedback about compliance with this trust framework, and to not engage in any practices intended to game or subvert the reputation system.

The Respect Network’s founding partners are working, each in their own way, to bring the Respect Trust Framework into common use. I like it as a way to scaffold up a market for VRM tools and services.

This summer Respect Network launched a world tour on which I participated as a speaker and photographer. (Disclosures: Respect Network paid my way, and The Searls Group, my consultancy, has had a number of Respect Network partners as clients. I am also on the board of Flamingo and  Customer Commons, a nonprofit. I don’t however, play favorites. I want to see everybody doing VRM succeed, and I help all of them every way I can. ) We started in London, then hit San Francisco, Sydney and Tel Aviv before heading home to the U.S. Here’s the press coverage:

In the midst of that, Respect Network also announced crowd funding of this button:

respect-connect-button

It operates on the first  promise of the Respect Trust Framework: We will respect each others’ digital boundaries. Think of it as a safe alternative to the same kind of button by Facebook.

The campaign also launched =names (“equals names”) to go with the Respect Connect button, and much else, eventually. These names are yours alone, unlike, say, your Twitter @ handle, which Twitter owns.

There is a common saying: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” In respect of that, =names cost something (like domain names), though not much. Selling =names are CSPs: Cloud Service Providers. There are five so far (based, respectively, in Las Vegas, Vienna, London, New York/Jerusalem and Perth):

bosonweb-logo danube_clouds-logo paoga-logo emmett_global-logo onexus-logo

They  are substitutable. Meaning you can port your =name and data cloud from one to the other as easily as you port your phone number from one company to another. (In fact the company that does this in the background for both your =name and your phone number is Neustar, another Respect Network partner.) You can also self-host your own personal cloud. Mine =name is =Doc, and it’s managed through Danube Clouds. (I actually got it a few years back. The tech behind =names has been in the works for awhile.)

The tour was something of a shakedown cruise. Lots was learned along the way, and everybody involved is re-jiggering their products, services and plans to make the most of what they picked up. I’ll share some of my own learnings for ProjectVRM in the next post.

 

 

#TakeBackControl with #VRM

June 23, 2014 / / 1 Comment

That’s a big part of what tonight’s Respect Network launch here in London is about. I’ll be speaking briefly tonight at the event and giving the opening keynote at the Immersion Day that will follow tomorrow. Here is a draft of what I’ll say tonight:

This launch is personal.

It’s about privacy.

It’s about control.

It’s about taking back what we lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

It’s about fixing a marketplace that has been ruled by giant companies for a hundred and fifty years — even on the Internet, which was designed — literally — to support our independence, our autonomy, our freedom, our liberty, our agency in the world.

Mass marketing required subordinating the individual to the group, to treat human beings as templates, demographics, typicalities.

The promise of the Internet was to give each of us scale, reach and power.

But the commercial Internet was built on the old model. On the industrial model. What we have now is what the security guru Bruce Schneier calls a feudal system. We are serfs in the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Principality of Amazon.

Still, it’s early. The Internet as we know it today — with browsers, ISPs, search engines and social media — is just eighteen years old. In the history of business, and of civilization, this is nothing. We’ve barely started.

But the Internet does something new that nothing else in human history ever did, and we’re only beginning to wrap our heads around the possibilities: It puts everybody and everything at zero functional distance from everybody and everything else — and at costs that want to be zero as well.

This is profound and huge. The fact that we have the Net means we can zero-base new solutions that work for each of us, and not just for our feudal overlords.

Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.”

That’s why we are here today. Respect Network has been working to give each of us a place to stand, to take back control: of our identities, our data, our lives, our relationships… of everything we do on the Net as free and independent human beings.

And what’s extra cool about this is that Respect Network isn’t just one company. It’s dozens of them, all standing behind the same promise, the same principles, the same commitment to build markets upward from you and me, and not just downward like eyes atop pyramids of control.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this tomorrow at Immersion Day, but for now I invite you to savor participating in a historic occasion.

I’m sure I’ll say something different, because I’ll speak extemporaneously and without the crutchware of slides. But I want to get this up  because I can’t print where I am at the moment, and it seems like a fun and useful thing to do in any case.

For more, see A New Data Deal, starting today, at my personal blog.

VRM at IIW

May 7, 2013 / / 1 Comment

We had a packed house yesterday at VRM Day 2013a — more than fifty people — prepping for IIW , which starts today and runs for two more at the Computer History Museumin Mountain View.

IIW is an unconference. No keynotes, no panels, no sponsors controlling the agenda. At the beginning of each day, particpants (who aren’t just “attendees”) choose the topics they want to talk about, and from there on it’s all breakout sessions in separate rooms. So here are some of the session candidates we put up on the whiteboard(and also on the wiki at the first link above):

  • Intentcasting
  • Governance
  • Personal Clouds in general
  • Interoperability mapping
  • How to get 4th parties interested in verticals, e.g. health care, government, retail) “Medicine cabinet” instead of wallets
  • What average joe/jane use case(s) will drive adoption?
  • Use case deep dive — An active session, attendees simulate the use case communications between the device, pcloud, vendor, etc.
  • standards/patterns
  • Next-gen SSO (e.g.Persona)
  • Legal Hacks & License harmonization
  • Wallets & apps for transactions, photos, etc. Bitcoin as a VRM money clip, safe deposit box… (see session from the last IIW)
  • Tracking and ad blocking, and harmonizing methods and experiences
  • Bringing 4th parties into verticals, e.g…
  • Health Care VRM — “medicine cabinets” rather than “wallets”
  • Real estate
  • Banking (including credit cards, payments, transactions)
  • Retail
  • Sovereign vs./+ Administrative identities
  • Terms and policies (Customer Commons’ work, plus Patient Privacy Rights)
  • Symbols (e.g. around privacy)
  • XDI + KRL, messaging & events
  • Internet of me and my things
  • Drummond, for Respect Network:
  • Discovery “DNSSIC for #pclouds”
  • Respect Connect “Facebook connect without the downsides”
  • Dictionary seminars
  • Personal data pain points, e.g. filling out forms
  • Collect useful techs/APIs

There are lists within that list, but my patience and connectivity aren’t up to it, so I’ll leave that be for now.

IIW XV

October 10, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The XVth IIW is coming up on October 23-25 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and VRM will be, as usual, a big topic — or collection of topics — there.

IIW stands for Internet Identity Workshop, but the topical range is much wider than identity alone. Front and center for the last several IIWs has been personal data (a special concern not only of many VRM development efforts, but of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium).

IIW is an unconference that Kaliya Hamlin, Phil Windley and I have been putting on twice a year since 2005. It could hardly be less formal or conference-like. There are no panels, no speakers, no keynotes. There are just participants. All the sessions are breakouts, and all the topics are chosen by participants, who come up with them at the start of each day, vetting whatever they like with the rest of the crowd. Some of the sessions are technical, many others are not. All of them are interesting, lively, and move things forward.

As in IIWs past, we have a VRM planning day on Monday, just before IIW. That’s the 22nd. Everybody is welcome. The purpose is to discuss what we’d like to make happen over the following three days. Unlike IIWs past, this planning day is also at the Computer History Museum. It’ll run from 9 to 5.

Here are some topics currently being vetted on the ProjectVRM list:

  1. Demonstrations of progress on various VRM fronts
  2. Relationship management tools, including UI elements such as r-buttons: ⊂ ⊃.
  3. Personal data store/locker/vault/cloud etc. efforts
  4. Personal operating systems (including personal cloud)
  5. Intentcasting, aka personal RFPs
  6. Turning DNT (Do Not Track) into DNT-D (Do Not Track + Dialog)
  7. Cooperation + competition among and between different VRM development efforts
  8. FOSS (free and open source software) and VRM
  9. Creating and working with APIs
  10. Standards and protocols old and new (e.g. XDI, RDF, tent.io)
  11. Role of governments (e.g. Midata in the UK, and privacy ministries in various countries)
  12. Legal / terms of service and engagement, and expression of preferences and policies
  13. Trust frameworks
  14. Working with industry verticals, such as banks and retail
  15. Matching up with QS (Quantified Self ) and self-hacking movements and interests (especially around personal data)
  16. Matching up VRM and CRM/sCRM
  17. Subject-based VRM, such as with the “subscription economy”
  18. VCs and other investors
  19. Relationships with other .orgs, e.g. PDE.Cc, Customer Commons
  20. Discovering and encouraging more VRM and VRooMy development efforts
  21. Alignment of talking points when evangelizing VRM
  22. Intention Economy
  23. Relationship Economy (and overlaps with the above)
  24. Identity-related matters, including NSTIC

I numbered them not in order of importance, but just to make them easier to discuss at the meeting. (e.g. “Let’s look at number 13”). Look forward to seeing you there.

Here are some photos from IIWs past. The photo up top is of a slab of metal covering a hole in pavement on a street in Manhattan. Saw it and couldn’t resist shooting it with my phone.

Let’s turn Do Not Track into a dialog

September 4, 2012 / / 9 Comments

Do Not Track (DNT), by resembling Do Not Call in name, sounds like a form of prophylaxis.  It isn’t. Instead it’s a request by an individual with a browser not to be tracked by a website or its third parties. As a request, DNT also presents an interesting opportunity for dialogue between user and site, shopper and retailer, or anybody and anything. I laid out one possibility recently in my Inkwell conversation at The Well. Here’s a link to the page, and here’s the text of the post:

The future I expect is one in which buyers have many more tools than they have now, that the tools will be theirs, and that these will enable buyers to work with many different sellers in the same way.

One primitive tool now coming together is “Do Not Track” (or DNT): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track It’s an HTTP header in a user’s browser that signals intention to a website. Browser add-ons or extensions for blocking tracking, and blocking ads, are also tools, but neither constitute a social protocol, because they are user-side only. The website in most cases doesn’t know ad or tracking blocking being used, or why. On the other hand, DNT is a social gesture. It also isn’t hostile. It just expresses a reasonable intention (defaulted to “on” in the physical world) not to be followed around.

But DNT opens the door to much more. Think of it as the opening to dialog:

User: Don’t track me.
Site: Okay, what would you like us to do?
User: Share the data I shed here back to me in a standard form, specified here (names a source).
Site: Okay. Anything else?
User: Here are my other preferences and policies, and means for matching them up with yours to see where we can agree.
Site: Good. Here are ours.
User: Good. Here is where they match up and we can move forward.
Site: Here are the interfaces to our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, so your VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) system can interact with it.
User: Good. From now on my browser will tell me we have a working relationship when I’m at your site, and I can look at what’s happening on both sides of it.

None of this can be contemplated in relationships defined entirely by the sellers, all of which are silo’d and different from each other, which is what we’ve had on the commercial Web since 1995. But it can be contemplated in the brick & mortar world, which we’ve had since Ur. What we’re proposing with VRM is nothing more than bringing conversation-based relationships that are well understood in the brick-and-mortar world into the commercial Web world, and weaving better marketplaces in the process.

A bit more about how the above might work:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2012/02/23/how-about-using-the-no-track-button-we-already-have/

And a bit more about what’s wrong with the commercial Web (so far, and it’s not hard to fix) here:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/2012/02/21/stop-making-cows-stop-being-calves /

So, to move forward, consider this post a shout-out to VRM developers, to the Tracking Protection Working Group at the W3C, to browser developers, to colleagues at Berkman (where Chris Soghoian was a fellow, about at the time he helped think up DNT) — and to everybody with the will and the ways to move forward on this thing.

And hey: it’s also our good luck that the next IIW is coming up at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, from October 23rd to 25th. IIW is the perfect place to meet and start hashing out DNT-D (I just made that up: DNT-Dialog) directions. IIW is an unconference: no keynotes, panelists or vendor booths. Participants vet and choose their own topics and break out into meeting rooms and tables. It’s an ideal venue for getting stuff done, which always happens, and why this is the 15th of them.

Meanwhile, let’s get in touch with each other and start making it happen.

Scaling business in parallel

June 28, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Companies and customers need to be able to deal with each other in two ways: as individuals and as groups.

As of today companies can deal with customers both ways. They can get personal with customers, and they can deal with customers en masse. Without the latter capability, mass marketing would not be possible.

Customers, on the other hand, can only deal with companies as individuals, one at a time. Dealing with companies as groups is still a challenge. Consider the way you engage companies in the marketplace, both online and off. Your dealings with companies, on the whole, are separate and sequential. Nothing wrong with that, but it lacks scale. Hence: opportunity.

We can arrive at that opportunity space by looking at company and personal dealings, each with two kinds of engagement circuits: serial and parallel.

Start with a small company, say a store with customers who line up at the counter. That store  deals with customers in a serial way:

business, serial

The customers come to the counter, one after another, in a series. Energy in the form of goods goes out, and money comes back.

As companies scale up in size, however, they’d rather deal with many customers in parallel rather than in series. A parallel circuit looks like this:

business, parallel

Here customers are dealt with as a group: many at once, and in the same way. This, in an extremely simplified form, is a diagram of mass marketing. While it is still possible for a company to deal with customers individually, the idea is to deal with as many customers as possible at once and in the same ways.

I use electronic symbols in those circuits because resistance (the zig-zag symbol) adds up in series, while it goes down in parallel. This too is a virtue of mass marketing. Thus one-to-many works very well, and has proven so ever since Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

Over on the customers’ side, the marketplace on the whole looks like this:

customer, serial

The customer goes from one company to the next. This is not a problem on the vendors’ side, except to the degree that vendors would rather customers not shop elsewhere. This is why vendors come up with loyalty programs and other schemes to increase “switching costs” and to otherwise extract as much money and commitment as possible out of the customer.

But, from the customer’s side, it would also be cool if they could enjoy scale in parallel across many companies, like this:

In the physical world this is all but unthinkable. But the Internet makes it very thinkable, because the Net reduces nearly to zero the functional distance between any two entities, and presents an open space across which many connections can be made, at once if necessary, with few limits on the number or scope of possibilities. There is also no limit to the new forms of interaction that can happen here.

For example, a customer could scale in parallel by expressing demand to multiple vendors at the same time, or could change her contact information at once with many companies. In fact this is basically what VRM projects are about: scaling in parallel across many other entites. (Not just vendors, but also elected officials, government agencies, churches, clubs, and so on.)

It is easy to see how companies can feel threatened by this. For a century and a half we in business have made a virtue of “targeting,” “acquiring,” “capturing,” “managing,” “locking in” and “owning” customers. But think about the free market for a minute. Shouldn’t free customers be more valuable than captive ones? Wouldn’t it be better if customers and prospects could send many more, and better, signals to the marketplace, and to vendors as well, if they were capable of having their own native ways of dealing, consistently, across multiple vendors?

We have that now with email and other forms of messaging. But why stop there?

Naturally, it’s easy to ask, Could social media such as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter provide some of what we need here? Maybe, but the problem is that they are not ours, and they don’t work for us — in the sense that they are accountable to us. They work for advertisers. Email, IM and browsing aren’t owned by anybody. They are also substitutable. For example, you can move your mail from Gmail to your own server or elsewhere if you like. Google doesn’t own email’s protocols. No browser company owns HTTP, HTML or any of the Web’s protocols.

The other problem with social solutions is that they’re not personal. And that’s the scale we’re talking about here: adding parallel capabilities to individuals. Sure, aggregation is possible, and a good thing. (And a number of VRM projects are of the aggregating-demand sort.) But the fallow ground is under our own feet. That’s where the biggest market opportunity is located. Also where, still, it is most ignored. Except, of course, here.

[Continued in VRM/CX + CRM/CX.]

Self-sovereign vs. administrative identity

March 25, 2012 / / 4 Comments

You know who you are. So does the IRS, the DMV, and every website and service online where you have a login and a password for.

But none of those entities really knows you. What they know is what the techies call a namespace. That namespace is not your identity. Instead, it’s an identifier. That identifier is an administrative construction. It’s something created so bureaucracies and technical systems could do what they do.

Who you are isn’t just how you appear in the namespaces of administrative entities. Who you are isn’t even the name your parents gave you. It’s your single, unitary and sovereign self, which remains fixed at the source—you—no matter what you’re called.

The names that matter most to you are the one you were given at birth and the ones you choose to be called by. Neither is fixed. You can change your names without changing who you are. So can others, but managing how you are known is a self-sovereign power. Samuel Clemens used the pen name Mark Twain. Walt Whitman, the great author of Song of Myself, did not call himself Walter.

Yes, some names come about socially, but the choice to use them for ourselves is personal. Take my own example. The name my parents gave me was David. Many friends and relatives still call me David or Dave. Many more, however, call me Doc. That name is what remains of Doctor Dave, which is what I was called on the radio and in a humor column in North Carolina in the late ’70s. (That image above was how I appeared in the column. I was around 30 then. I actually look like that now.) My surname is one my father chose to spell the same as did his father, but not his grandparents.  (They went by Searles.)

The nickname Doc came along after I started a company with two other guys, one of whom was named David. He and the other guy (the late great Ray Simone, who also drew the Doctor Dave image above) called me Doctor Dave around the office, and with clients and suppliers. After awhile three syllables seemed too many, and they all just called me Doc. Also relevant: David was actually David’s middle name. His first was Paul.

Nicknames are often context-dependent. People who knew me through business called me Doc. Everybody else called me David or Dave.

That was in North Carolina, where I had lived for most of the two decades before our company opened an office in Silicon Valley and I went out there prospecting. That was in the Fall of ’85. I knew almost nobody in California, other than a few business contacts who called me Doc. But I wasn’t sure about keeping Doc as a nickname, since in a way I was starting over in a new place. So,  I market tested Doc vs. David when I went to the Comdex conference in October of that year in Las Vegas.  The test was simple. I had two badges made. One said David Searls and the other said Doc Searls. I was there four days and alternated between the two badges. Afterwards everybody remembered Doc and nobody remembered David. So I decided not to dump the nickname, and it stuck.

My point is that I still had control over what I chose to be called. I had sovereign authority over that.

The problem I’m trying to surface here is that we need full respect for self-sovereign identities, and identifiers, before we can solve the problem of highly fractured and incompatible administrative identifiers — a problem that has only become worse with the growth of the Web, where by design we are always the submissive and dependent party: calves to administrative cows.

MoxyTongue puts it this way:

You are a social ID-slave by default today.

I want a Human ID; a personal data construct with sovereign source authority.

Society uses a social construct to give me an Administrative ID.

The difference is origin.

I do not participate in Society primarily as an AdminID.

I am a Human ID by sovereign source authority, backed by American Rights that I know how to wield administratively and matriculate accordingly.

Structure yields results. Therefore, if we get the origin of ID correct, we can get the data administration framework oriented right.

A Human ID -led Society with embedded structural Rights and empowerments is the socio-economic game changer.

That is my NSTIC proposal. That’s my open proposal: a new data administration framework for identity.

Deployed across Society by opt-in opportunity structure.

Deployable across a global ecosystem by data design.

I see an ID as a door. The existence of the door is a social construct… a decision…

But once that decision is made, it is Human executed in every regard.

ID-slavery is what we have by administrative structure today. Our managerial intent in servicing it is flawed by design.

A Human ID comes with #vrm baked in. Such is the bi-directional transactional authority, multi-role nature of it.

And most important… we all approach the door on equal Terms… one door…infinite possibilities.

Self-driven socio-economic structure.

Call it whatever you want…it starts with your identity being structured right.

VRM for me grew out of two things:

  1. The unfinished work of Cluetrain. The ‘one clue to get’ there said “our reach exceeds your grasp.” But it didn’t, and it still doesn’t. Much of the grasp is administrative, and it has to do with defining, for us, who we are. That’s a bug, not a feature.
  2. The unfinished work of the digital identity development community, which I believe will remain unfinished as long as we try to solve one symptom with another one. The symptom we’re trying to solve is regarding administrative IDs as independent variables, rather than as dependent ones. Until we recognize that the only true independent variable is the soul of the independent self, we’ll continue to seek administrative solutions to the problem of administrative identity slavery.

Have you ever noticed that when somebody says “That’s a good question?” it’s usually because they don’t yet have an answer? That applies here. To the question of how we make sovereign-source identity the independent variable, I don’t have an answer. But I do want to work on it.

I’ll be doing that tomorrow at a meeting on identity in Silicon Valley. On May 1-3 in Mountain View we’ll be holding the Internet Identity Workshop again. It’s our fourteenth, and it’s a terrific unconference. If you care about this stuff, you should come. Your sovereign self would like that.

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