| Brian, and All,
I'm not at all surprised to hear about this..
2.5 years ago.. I attended a QS and led a (hard won) session for developers on how to do what they do with Quantified Self data, but still get permission and ask the users, and let them control their own data.
I say hard won because the QS organizers seemed puzzled by this topic of people driving their own data, of their need to control this very personal information collected and used by QS apps and devices, etc.. and therefore it was really tough to even get the session but the organizers did allow it on the last day, announced verbally from the stage that morning.
About my session:
I get things have evolved at QS.. but i think that evolving has just been the organizers are more open to the idea of the users driving their own data.. it's rarely discussed and the developers and makers that attend don't have it on their radar, even now. I occasionally attend QS things and don't see much change.
I do find it disheartening..
On a separate but related note, this came out a couple of days ago:
U.S. doctors don't believe patients need full access to health records
This is going to be an upward battle.. getting access to data about ourselves from devices, healthcare providers.. etc.
Mary On Mar 13, 2013, at 2:42 AM, Brian Behlendorf wrote: On Tue, 12 Mar 2013, Doc Searls wrote: On Mar 12, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Brian Behlendorf <
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I went to a quantified self session, and the idea that the person this data is all about should be in charge of where that data is and able to combine it from different products/vendors was relevatory.
Meaning it was a dawning of realization for people there? If so, wow.
Almost. It was this session: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2013/events/event_IAP15589Two of the three speakers were device makers. One was a moderator who just did intros. The fourth, Gary Wolf, my dear friend and Hotwired co-conspirator, who is considered a "godfather" in QS as he has written extensively about it for Wired and some other channels, started his short speech by talking about how difficult it is to integrate the "learnings we get from each device ... I have to cut-n-paste from a web page into an excel spreadsheet to integrate data from my Nike Fuel Band with data from something else." Upon Gary's prompt, I suggested to the panel that there may be many consumers holding back from engaging in QS due to a perception that each device is creating separate silos of data being held by companies with whom there has never before needed to be a relationship of data trust, and that just gives lots of folks the creeps. At the other extreme are the device enthusiasts who have more than 1 or 2 devices and want to build dashboards to combine data - "learnings" - in a way more automated than cut-n-paste into excel. So I asked the panel - who is focused on solving that problem? What standards are emerging that the device makers are looking at, or that the hobbyists are starting to bootstrap? Maybe this was the wrong panel to ask that of, but the device makers went off on a tangent about sharing data with doctors and how complicated that all was due to that pesky HIPAA thing, which was both totally not the question I asked and also ironically a domain that is standardizing rapidly anyways. Gary simply didn't know of anyone trying to integrate the QS space, but felt strongly it should be done - a "someone aughta" rather than a "here's how". The rest of the audience Q&A continued to ask questions about data and privacy and terms of use, even if the device makers really would have rather kept telling you about the bra that will tell you if you have breast cancer, or the whole-house 3-D motion sensors that will learn your "behavioral genome". It was disheartening because I assumed the QS crowd was stuffed with Maker and Open Hardware types for whom locally aggregating data and controlling devices in a synchronized way would be second nature. But everyone's got the "big data = "$$"" addiction now, has been pummelled to "keep it simple for the end user", and look at hardware as the loss leader. I went to a Big Data meetup where we formed off into tables, and naturally I gravitated to the "data sharing platforms" table, and the conversation went from HBase and Hadoop to how to help the Microsoft ad developer and the Experian executive at the table work together. :(
Not surprising. When I'm at that kind of thing I feel like I'm in the antebellum South, listening to the plantation owners talk about how to get more productivity out of their slaves.
HA. Well, enjoy the crowd. There is still plenty of fun in the halls, the streets, the clubs and the restaurants.
Seeing @amandapalmer play her Ukelele song while standing on a bar at a BMorg staff party was hard to top. Until the next night, which found us firing a potato gun off the deck of Richard de Cayeux's house. One hopeful sign - I had a conversation with Amit Kiran, an MBA and "Design Strategist" with Maya (the design tools company):
http://www.maya.com/about/amit-kiran
He said he'd just worked on a book on the relationship between big data and user-centered design; as in, how can we help individuals - more mortals - understand how to relate to the universe of their personal data floating out there, and design our apps in ways that address that. Or something - I can't find a link to the book yet, I'll email him and ask for it.
Love to see it.
As Drummond guessed, it indeed has to be "Trillions" he was describing, so maybe I was reading more into his description than I should have, but I'll add it to my queue regardless. Glad to hear that firm's engaged already in pclouds. Brian
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