Featured Fellow: John Clippinger

This is one of a series of posts on Berkman's fellows (Derek Bambauer, Mike Best, Diane Cabell, Phil Malone, Paul Hoffert). The Berkman Center is home to approximately thirty fellows, all of whom focus their time and energy on issues concerning the Internet, including Internet governance, privacy concerns, intellectual property rights, competition policy and antitrust issues, electronic commerce, the role of new media and journalism proper, and digital media, among many others.

John Clippinger is a graduate of Yale University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a Senior Fellow at the Boston University School of Management’s Institute for Leading a Dynamic Economy, and is a member and regular participant of the Pentagon sponsored Highland Forum, The Aspen Institute, CEO Leadership Institute of Yale University School of Management, and The Santa Fe Institute Business Network.

Below is a Q&A with John Clippinger about his work.

Question: Last week's conference, Identity Mashup, was a huge success. As conference organizer and creator, what were your favorite moments?

Answer: There were many moments. One of our objectives all along was to get the major players in the identity space – IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Verisign, Oracle, Liberty Alliance, open source community-  to really embrace an interoperable – open source approach to identity and security and at the same time recognize the primacy of giving the customer control over their information. To see that really materialize was amazingly gratifying for me.  All of those who worked for identity space We worked hard on

Another moment was to see how many people really appreciated the importance of a full inter-disciplinary approach to understanding identity. A number of people came up to me and said how  grateful they were to participate in panels on trust, the commons, reputation and governance – that typically are not covered by a conference on identity or privacy.  That was really really reflected in Derrick Ashong’s Music Mashup and his panel on human hybrids, which turned out to be the Andy Oram’s, a technical writer from O’Reilly, favorite panel.

But what was perhaps most gratifying moment for me was the actual demonstration of an i-card both a Best Buy and My Virtual Model demonstration which really showed what was possible and the demonstration of interoperability with IBM, Novell and Microsoft.  That made it real for me and so many people worked so hard to make that a reality. Lots of people literally from around the world came together to make that a reality.

Question: You've long been involved in the development of network technologies to facilitate spontaneous social networking. Describe some of those efforts.

Answer: It goes all the way back over ten years ago when I was at Coopers and Lybrand – now PriceWaterhouse Coopers – where I developed a corporate wide, web based -”knowledge management system. What became apparent to be was that people worked and learned in social networks – it was more important who looked at something or referred it than what it was. I was also active at the Santa Fe Institute ans wrote and edited a book called the Biology of Business on the application of John Holland’s principles of self-organization to business. I also worked with a group in the Office of Transformation on how network principles of self-organization can be applied to large scale organizations. In 2000 I formed a company with Paul Trevithick called Parity Communications that was founded to apply social networks to mobile platforms. With the crash Parity changed it focus to contract and consulting work on social networking technologies. Early on we recognized that if there were to be a robust and scaleable social layer to the Net, there first had to be a robust and open identity layer – and hence, we have always felt that social networking technology is tied to have a persistent and accountable identity. Shortly after that Social Physics was formed and Paul and Mary Ruddy of Parity began work on the Higgins Trust Framework within the Eclipse Foundation – an open source group.

One of the reasons I came to the Berkman Center was to work on how to develop peer based social governance mechanisms. This began as project at the Aspen Institute on how to create an “accountable net” that was self governing. One of the the things that became apparent to me from the beginning was that in order to have accountability you first had to have some form of persistent identity. This was a very unpopular position at the time among some several Berkman Fellows – who deplored the notion of any form of identity layer or accountability. Yet thorough conversations, it became apparent to me that some form of authenticated anonymity was necessary and possible.

Question: While the buzz focuses on the potential financial rewards of harnessing social networks, many industries have seen supporting social networks as necessary to their success, such as the US military. For those unfamiliar with the development of social networking tools outside of popular culture, would you showcase some of the best and latest efforts (when possible)?

Answer: I think social networking technology is still in its infancy. The phenomenal growth of sites like MySpace and Facebook – belie underlying problems of identity that will really need to be resolved if social networks are to really to become viable and trusted.  Likewise, the DoD efforts in really having highly distributed decision making, what they call edge organization – will require coming to terms with the problems that Higgins is addressing.

Question: Over the last two years, you've researched and written about how discoveries in the new sciences such as the neuro-sciences, complexity sciences and evolutionary biology and sociology are transforming our understanding of Human Nature, specifically, the role of trust, reputation, social emotions, and self organization in forming effective forms of social and economic exchange. What's going on? What's changing?

Answer: Yeah, this is a very exciting area of research and real breakthroughs. I have been an enormous skeptic of the social sciences and down right hostile to classic economics. Now advances in neurosciences and evolutionary biology and neuro-economics are changing all that. This stuff is real science and it stands up. More importantly, it can be used in the design of social networks and new governance regimes. I just heard Ray Ozzi of Microsoft say that behavioral analytics are the next big thing – and the Google guys and gals were nodding their heads.

Question: What social networking tools do you use?  :-)

Answer: I have tried out a number of the social networking sites – but I am not comfortable using – them – I am not a teenager trying to set up a band or hookup- and I am not comfortable sharing my contact lists with people I never met nor ever want to meet. We are constantly experimenting with new tools.

Where can people find me? Through the Berkman Center or through my email jclippinger@cyber.law,.harvard.edu

Question: What do you think are the most pressing concerns and obstacles to the development of social networks online?

Answer: As I said, the real issue is resolving identity, trust, and privacy issues in a way that people won't be turned off.

Question: If someone would like to learn more about this issue, what books/articles/organizations would you recommend they look at?

Answer: They should look at the Identity Mashup site.

Question: What's next? What are you going to be focusing your efforts on?

Answer: I really want to make Higgins a reality and see an ecosystem of user centric identity rapidly evolve. I am especially interested in reputation, trust, and peer based governance.