Re: [projectvrm] Fred Wilson's talk

[Doc Searls < >]

+1 Jer. Well put.

Doc

On Dec 16, 2013, at 11:12 PM, Jeremie Miller < "> > wrote:

What has fundamentally shifted and most of the world hasn't caught up with yet, is that WE are now the vendors.  Networked technology is now enabling all of us to send, lend, spend, VEND with each other at a growing scale.  The core VALUE in that equation is reach, not scale, as the scale is fixed to the creative capacity of each individual.

We're all working on technology infrastructure for a stack that is centered on humanism over capitalism, and if that ship has sailed, then I'm happily on it and welcome the new land, but I think there will be a lot of friends there :)

Jer

On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Peter Cranstone < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Doc,

The problem is not outside the Web - or that it’s a heterarchy - the core problem is that the web is a ‘stateless protocol’ (a communications protocol that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of requests and responses) - which means in short that it has Alzheimer’s. Why do you think we need cookies? Because the web forgets without the ability to read something on the users device. And those cookies are basically enabling the entire Adtech industry. And encrypting everything does NOT solve the Vendor problem of creating value, it simply adds a huge load to the Web.  

As for secure communications - that ship has sailed. We NO longer have a decentralized web. A majority of the web runs through just a few service providers which provide the NSA with all they need. 

As for this whole Personal Cloud - which I agree with. What people continue to miss in every conversation is the following…

• If you want people to use the Personal Cloud which is going to REQUIRE a behavioral change then you MUST show the value in terms that THEY (I) understand. Everybody keeps telling me that my personal data is worth X - and yet I never see X in a place that matters to ME

Let me illustrate this point: Instagram just tried something new - so far adoption has been anemic - so you have to ask yourself ‘Why?’ - well it required a behavioral change and the consumer cannot figure out what the VALUE is based on that change. So they try it and then go back to what they know because it offers them all the value they need.

Personal Clouds are a great idea - but if I’m going to put all my data in them then I have to understand in terms that make sense to ME why this is a good thing. So far there is ZERO validation to prove that there is value in a personal cloud other than more work for me. If we’re going to get VRM in to the end zone then we have to focus - and we have to PROVE that a Vendor gets value from this personal cloud based on the data I share. 

In the Mustard Seed example below - exactly how does it make money? If we can’t answer that question then how do we quantify the value of the secret conversation. 99% of people communicating on the web do NOT require secure conversations. Skype and iMessage already do a fine job. So exactly who is the customer who is going to use this Mustard Seed approach to secure communication? Again we need a named customer - and then we need to call him/her and find out if they would be willing to pay for this and how much.

RE: The Social Stack.

There are a billion people on FaceBook - lots of value - no value to switching to a new stack.

The reason I hammer on this VALUE proposition is because it’s so darn important. There are a ton of ‘seeds’ sprouting all over the web. We know - but what we cannot answer on this forum is how they provide value and then showcase empirically that value.

If we’re going to offer value to startups who listen to this forum then we need to do them a favor - ask hard questions, drive to empirical measurements and real world customer use cases. 

There’s enough smarts here to do just that.

Peter

From: Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> >
Date: Monday, December 16, 2013 at 9:26 AM
To: ProjectVRM list < " target="_blank"> >
Cc: Jeremie Miller < " target="_blank"> >, Adriana Cronin-Lukas < " target="_blank"> >, John Clippinger < " target="_blank"> >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Fred Wilson's talk

Fred was talking, I believe, about activities outside the Web.

What he and others among us get is a growing sense that giving people control over privacy, identity, permissions, agreements and social interactions is hard or impossible through the Web alone — and instead must be addressed at the level of the Net below the Web. 

That's not just because the Web, or at least its commercial sector, has become corrupted by bad acting. It's also because the Web is client-server, or calf-cow, in its architecture. It is hierarchy built on heterarchy. This isn't wrong; it's just inadequate. (Adriana Lukas, who has been active around VRM and related issues since before the beginning of this list, has been doing some great thinking around heterarchy.)

The is what telehash is about, for example: "It works by sending and receiving small encrypted bits of JSON (with optional binary payloads) via UDP using an efficient routing system based on Kademlia, a proven and popular Distributed Hash Table " Jeremie Miller leads that. He also led development of Jabber and the XMPP protocol for instant messaging.

Also check out what John Clippinger and friends are developing at IDCubed. For example, Open Mustard Seed:

A Framework for developing and deploying secure cloud applications to collect, compute on, and share personal data

• Developer support enables rapid creation of cloud based private social mobile applications

• Secured access using OpenID Connect

• Modular structure of service APIs and access control defined using legal constraints

• Automated deployment of Service Components (from hardware to complete cloud-based mobile application deployment)

• Personal Data Service providing cloud storage and secure computation

The Open Mustard Seed project is an open-source framework for developing and deploying web apps in a secure, user-centric personal cloud. The framework provides a stack of core technologies that work together to provide a high level of security and ease of use when sharing and collecting personal and environmental data, controlling web-enabled devices, and engaging with others to aggregate information and view the results of applied computation via protected services.

The scope of this effort is largely driven by the needs of the Trust Framework architecture for personal data ecosystems being developed at ID3.

Overall, the project aims to contribute a layer of software and methodology for the development, deployment, and management of user-centric, data-intensive, and distributed cloud applications and services.

Within that, there is openPDS:

This is part of the Open Mustard Seed project towards creating a full Trust Network reference platform. openPDS follows the recommendations of the WEF, the US NSTIC and the US Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. openPDS allows sensitive data processing to take place within a user’s Personal Data Store. The dimensionality of the data can thus be individually reduced on a per-need basis before being anonymously shared. The framework allows for PDSs to engage in privacy-preserving group computation, which can be used as a replacement for centralized aggregation.

The core principles of openPDS are:

• Answers, not Data

• Permissions for Sharing

• Auditability

• Governance 

Also, The Social Stack for New Social Contracts, about which John writes,

It consists of five layers of social technologies, each of which deals with distinct challenges in securing and sharing personal private data in controlled digital contexts.  The five layers deal respectively with Core Identity; Identity Management and Authentication; Trust Frameworks; Core Services; and Applications. 

The purpose of the Social Stack is to help establish distributed systems to manage personal identity on open platforms.  Together, the five layers can enable trustworthy forms of collaboration, exchange and governance of resources.  These technologies are already actively developing and starting to coalesce fitfully into a more integrated, open software platform.  It is a process that ID^3 is actively facilitating in a number of demonstration projects.

The basic goal of the Social Stack is to enable people to develop trusted online social and commercial relationships that can persist and scale.  This capacity depends upon people being able to control their own personal information.  They must also be able to efficiently authenticate other people’s identities based on self-selected criteria for mutual association, trust and risk. 

If equipped with the proper tools, distributed networks and groups could allocate their resources and privileges among their participant-members as they see fit.  The Social Stack would enable sustainable, bottom-up forms of governance to take root and grow.  The system could be used to advance commerce, civic engagement, social purposes or non-market provisioning.

In this sense, the Social Stack has sweeping implications for political governance in both theoretical and practical terms.  It could transform the role of the State, by empowering citizens to devise new forms of self-actualized institutions that exhibit greater social legitimacy, efficacy and adaptability than governments.  As a technical and political matter, the Social Stack would not consist of a single, monolithic set of protocols and software systems, but rather an evolving plurality of approaches animated by users themselves.  It would also be completely decentralized and open source, and so the platform could not be “captured” by any single player or group and would always be capable of evolving and innovating.

As Fred said in his talk (and many among us have also been saying), it's still early. We have lots to do.

cc'ing Jeremie, John and Adriana, whose thoughts I welcome on the matter.

Doc

On Dec 15, 2013, at 8:56 PM, Peter Cranstone < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

We already have a Privacy Protocol - it¹s called HTTP. What we don¹t have
is a way to get rid of cookies which run on top of HTTP.

We need to come up with a way that allows the Vendors web site to still
function without cookies, and for the user to not have to re-type data due
to missing cookies. In the irony of all ironies the intention signal is
the cookie¹s replacement. Because it solves the problem for both consumer
AND vendor by creating NEW VALUE without requiring a change in behavior.


Peter

On 12/14/13, 6:29 PM, "Doc Searls" < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2013/12/14/fred-wilsons-talk-at-leweb/

Further thoughts welcome.

Doc