Clay spent some time extending his “group action just got easier” theme. As a recent example, he took a look at Improv Everywhere and their No Pants Day; as ever, he kept reminding us of the possibilities afforded by group action. In his words “What happens if you take something that people are good at doing, that people like doing, and make it simpler and cheaper?’ “What happens when the medium of communication is global, ubiquitous, social and cheap?”

He then spent some time on the “social” third sector, distinguished from the revenue- and profit-driven private sector and the social-value-creation driven public sector. Comment was also made on the ability of small groups in such social contexts to protect themselves against freeloaders, in contrast to the tolerance shown to freeloaders by larger groups, ostensibly as a result of their inability to defend themselves.

The Gnarly Kitty example was also interesting, with its “in the public but not for the public” stance. Intriguingly, in this context, Clay averred that journalism had morphed from a profession to an activity.

The most interesting part of the debate was when he touched various aspects of Barack Obama’s campaign and early presidency. He walked us through the Will.I.Am video and its impact, particularly when one bears in mind the fact that the Obama campaign didn’t commission the video, pay for it in any way or even endorse it; yet it had a material effect on making people believe that the Obama presidency was actually possible, that it had moved into the bounds of reality.

There’s a lot more I could cover, but I will not be able to do it justice here; you’re better off reading others like Michael Mahemoff, who covered it well here. Better still, go buy the book. In the meantime, I’d like to spend some time on one particular aspect of the session. Clay talked to us about the way marijuana legalisation was voted as No 1 of all the issues facing Obama, as reported here.

He suggested that hen something like this happens, there are really three choices. To act on the suggestions as ranked, seems wrong, in effect letting the gamers win. To cherry-pick from the suggestions seems undemocratic. So we have to do something else, which is to fix the system. And this is hard.

Why is it hard? Well, for one thing, to make this happen properly, we need to fix the treatment of identity. We need to make sure that those who were entitled to vote did so. We need to make sure that those that were entitled to vote did so once and once only. And we need to make sure that the votes so cast are collated and counted fairly and accurately.

He made a really important point here. This issue of identity is not one that is held up by the unavailability of appropriate technology; rather, it is held up by adoption, which is a social and cultural thing.

I discussed with him the possibility of learning from online communities such as opensource, which are usually governed by some version of benevolent despotry: 1000lb gorilla, moderator, core, whatever. While we can learn from such communities, we need to remember that governments differ from such communities in some critical ways: for example, people can leave opensource communities if they don’t like what’s going on; or, where they like some aspect of the output but disagree with the direction, they can fork from them; this is not easily possible with government, there are physical constructs that don’t play out as easily as the virtual or digital aspects.

I left there musing about something which has exercised my mind before in this particular context. Voting alone does not seem enough.

I think the answer has to do with taxes. What I visualise is this:

Each of us is given the opportunity to “allocate” our taxes against the specific initiatives we would like them spent on. In effect each of us would choose from hundreds of initiatives and public expenditure heads, and allocate the tax we pay, in increments, across the initiatives we want to support. The withholding of tax against a specific heading becomes a form of protest. The allocation of tax monies towards a specific initiatives becomes a strong indicator of support.

There are some risks. Prima facie such a system would be biased towards the rich, if the actual sum of money was seen as a vote. To prevent this, each person has exactly 100 units of tax-vote. My tax-vote may be worth more or less than my next-door neighbour, but from a voting perspective it carries the same weight. A widow’s mite is the same as the billionaire’s largesse.

Another risk is in the likely imbalance between the allocation of funds and the usage of funds, as it were. When people withhold funds from initiatives they will definitely gain from, in effect “fractional freeloading.” One way to avoid this is to make everyone’s allocation visible.

Which in turn leads to an interesting question. As we proceed down this route, as we become more and more reliant on the internet to exercise our democratic rights, duties and powers, what price anonymity? Will a person’s vote stay secret? Should it?

One thing is clear. While there are many technological advances in the context of democratic action, there are still many issues to solve. Identity, confidentiality and privacy form one set. Freeloading and the Tragedy of the Commons forms a second set. These are not the only sets, but probably the most important. And they have to be seen in the context of social and cultural change, and not as technical or process barriers.

First, a few disclaimers.

One, I am not against cyberlibertarians. I count many cyberlibertarians as my friends. In fact I’d even let my daughter marry one. Some people think I am a cyberlibertarian. And I don’t argue with them.

Two, despite all that, I signed up with the UK Border Agency IRIS scheme as soon as I could, use it regularly, and will probably sign up with its equivalent for the US and Europe as soon as I can. So I am not against the technology.

Three, I like what Bruce Schneier has to say about many things, and particularly about things to do with security. This liking predates (by a long way) and is completely unconnected with, our becoming colleagues much later. [Incidentally, we have never met, either as colleagues or before then, although we've been in the same room quite a few times. Maybe this will change, we're both at Supernova.]

Having said all that.

There’s identity and there’s identity. “Identity” covers things I assert about myself, things that only I can assert about myself. It covers things that others assert about me, things that only others can assert about me. It also covers things that I assert, but where my assertion is weak unless it is backed up by someone or something else.

When I say that I like Grateful Dead or Traffic or Crosby Stills Nash and Young or John Mayall or Jim Croce, I am asserting something about myself. A last.fm audioscrobbler attached to iTunes can see whether my listening habits match my stated likes, but it cannot say what I like. That is for me to say. When a bank says that I have a credit rating of X, they are asserting something about me that I cannot assert about myself. When a government gives me a token to help me assert who I am (such as a passport or a driving licence), the government is doing something I couldn’t do as well.

So there’s identity and there’s identity. It’s all the rage, it’s the happening thing, there are now more people working in the identity space than in call centres worldwide. [Doesn't it feel like that to you?].

And, as Chris Skinner says, it looks like biometrics will become more important, more dominant, more pervasive. Shivers down spine. Collywobbles. Paroxysms of sweat. I begin to get a teensy weensy bit concerned.

Why? Not because I think someone’s going to gouge my eye out and re-use it. Not because I think that someone’s going to chop my finger off. [Yes, there are times and there are places where this can and probably will happen, but in this conversation I consider the Chopping Off argument to be a Red Herring.]

I’ve been concerned about the use of biometrics in everyday life for a few decades now. Nearly 30 years ago, when I worked for Burroughs Corporation, we had a division that manufactured ATMs. And I remember seeing a presentation where people queued up to a hole in the wall to draw money, presented their eyeballs to an even smaller hole in the wall, had their retinas scanned before the hole vomited out cash. And I thought to myself, who designs these things? Who imagines that someone would actually do this? Did they talk to anyone, any would-be customers?

If you want to understand the pros and cons of biometrics, you must read this article in ACM by Bruce. So what if it’s almost a decade old, the points he makes still hold true. It’s an expansion and improvement on an another note by him, written a year earlier in his Crypto-Gram newsletter.

Here are some excerpts:

[B]iometrics work well only if the verifier can verify two things: one, that the biometric came from the person at the time of verification, and two, that the biometric matches the master biometric on file. If the system can’t do that, it can’t work

Biometrics are unique identifiers, but they are not secrets. You leave your fingerprints on everything you touch, and your iris patterns can be observed anywhere you look.

Once someone steals your biometric, it remains stolen for life; there’s no getting back to a secure situation.

Biometrics are powerful and useful, but they are not keys. They are not useful when you need the characteristics of a key: secrecy, randomness, the ability to update or destroy.

[B]iometrics are necessarily common across different functions. Just as you should never use the same password on two different systems, the same encryption key should not be used for two different applications. If my fingerprint is used to start my car, unlock my medical records, and read my electronic mail, then it’s not hard to imagine some very unsecure situations arising.

As a frequent traveller, I am happy to use biometrics-based processes when it mean my immigration and security queues are shortened significantly. IRIS has been a boon for me.

But if my bank asked me to start using iris recognition based schemes, I would probably change bank.

Why?

Now you must be used to people tritely asking you “So what does good look like to you?” [What an appalling question. Why can't they ask you what you want? I'm old and patient now, so I forgo the temptation to "throw them under that question", a la that other appalling phrase "throw them under the bus". Who thinks this unadulterated crap up anyway?]

So humour me for a second and allow me to use the phrase “What does bad look like?” When I use IRIS, “bad” means that someone has managed (a) to get a copy of my iris as stored in some humongous central database somewhere (b) convinced some hardware and software in a booth that he/she is me returning to the UK. Depending on my actual travelling status, that may throw up some conflicts and errors, and the worst that could happen is that I spend some time sorting out the mess when I next pass through. But the facts will be on my side, and I don’t live in a police state. People may be appalled by CCTV Britain, by Guantanamo Bay, by 42 day detentions, but none of that is as scary as The Emergency was to me in 1975-77. Not even close.

It’s not as if someone can leave my iris behind at a crime scene. If someone finds my eyeball rolling around alongside a corpse, the chances are the corpse is me. if someone leaves a photograph of my iris behind as a calling card, not even the Keystone Cops will assume that I’m the likely perpetrator.

So bad doesn’t look too bad in many of these cases.

When it comes to banking, it’s a different story. Bad can look bad. If you’d like a humorous way of finding out why, listen to this clip by Mitchell and Webb. [Oh the humanity. Worth listening to for that line alone.]

We already use biometrics for banking, the common-or-garden signature is a biometric, particularly if you start analysing pressure and time and emphasis and all that jazz. People have tried to forge signatures, and if electronic signatures become more common, then I am sure that people will try even harder to forge signatures.

I try and adapt to changes in the environment around me. For example I think about where I want to use my credit or debit cards so as to minimise the risk of cloning, and avoid the places where I think the risk is high. If my bank said I could use iris recognition in order to withdraw cash, I wouldn’t sign up. I would use other ways. if they said that it was the only way, I would use other banks. Simple as that.

It doesn’t mean that I am against the use of biometrics. Rather, I am against the use of biometrics in environments where the weaknesses of biometrics overwhelm the strengths. As stated before, I use biometrics to enter the UK. And I would be happy to use biometric locks in my front door, as Xeni Jardin refers to here.

As Bruce says in that article, if someone wanted access to my house, they can make a surreptitous copy of my key or throw a rock through my window. They don’t have to cut my finger off.

Biometrics aren’t bad. Biometric banking is already here, as in the use of signatures. But we need to think hard about allowing increased use of biometrics in banking. Because bad could then look very bad.

Let’s be careful out there.

Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.
Bob Woodward: But you could tell me that.
Deep Throat: No, I have to do this my way. You tell me what you know, and I’ll confirm. I’ll keep you in the right direction if I can, but that’s all. Just… follow the money.

All The President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein, 1974

Identity theft. Mmhmm. A term that hasn’t been around that long. Just what gets “stolen”? Maybe Mitchell and Webb can help us understand that: just watch this clip. [Thanks to Kevin Marks for giving me the tweet-up.]

As I said, this is great. So what’s the problem? The problem is that it’s a small community. We aren’t going to solve this issue unless we have a somewhat larger number of people truly engaged. One way of engaging people is to keep raising awareness of what identity is about.

Yesterday I promised to review what I thought and felt about identity, and to kick that off, here’s an extract from a year-old post:

The identity debate seems to encompass many disparate things, either directly or indirectly, so I’m going to just list them to begin with:

• Ecce Homo: A means of identifying who I am, with some other relatively static data, eminently suitable for “microformat” treatment, and probably needing to be combined with some other way of confirming who I am, “two-factor authentication”. Like having a card and a PIN or signature. This is as permanent as can be, a metaphorical passport or fingerprint or iris pattern or whatever. This probably includes all the numerical tags I collect like frequent flyer and affinity memberships. It can include my credit cards and accounts. It is the same regardless of the specific relational or transactional conversation I happen to be in. My gut feel is that each person should have only one of these, and that it should be “small but perfectly formed”. And that it has to exist and be verifiable in a dotorg state.
• Letters of Intent: A means of letting people know about my intentions, what I’m interested in or looking for. I make known my preferences and interests. Some of them are temporary, some of them are permanent. I choose who I want to tell. As in Doc looking for rental cars. As in my signalling to individuals in my social network that I will be within n miles of where they are at a given time. My information. Signalled to whom I want to. When and where I want to. Giving the listener an opportunity to converse with me and relate to me. Even things like last.fm are variants of this.
• Tell them Phil sent ya: A way of associating other people’s perceptions of me with me, both qualitative as well as quantitative. This is trust that I can acquire but not control. Ratings I have, whether credit or eBay or college scores or whatever. Variable over time. Not suppressible by me. But challengeable by me, so that dispute or contention can be flagged. I may have many such ratings, used for different purposes, but inspectable at the behest of the requestor. And changed as a result of the conversation.
• Trust me, I’m a doctor: A way of telling other people my own perception of me. Kitemarking my sites and blogs and articles and photos and quotes and whatever. Here what I am doing is endorsing stuff in the public domain about me, indicating (a) this came from me or (b) even though it does not come from me, I nevertheless approve it, I endorse it. This is like a great seal, a way of stamping that something is Orl Korrect. Or that Kilroy was Here.
• My name is Bond, James Bond: A licence to do something. Granted by someone else. Usually not transferable. Usually not permanent either.
• Come up and see my etchings: My choosing to expose things I have done, expired and executed letters of intent. Pictures of my activity with others. Kiss-and-tell. My information. My choice as to whom I share it with. And I can make this choice single-use or temporary or permanent. Probably even includes financial transactions and medical history.

Above and beyond this, I think identity is as much about what I stand for, the community I belong to, the community that will have me as a member. Identity itself is essentially social rather than individual. I will spend the next couple of days going through my own thoughts and notes on the subject, and then summarise them for readers. All this is distinct and separate from design and implementation issues, which will follow later.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what's happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.

I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe ten years ago. Like you, I’ve seen many such illusions in my time, but none of them has had the same impact as this one had. Some of you may not have seen it, so I thought I’d share it with you while musing about context.

I think context is the key differentiator for Web 2.0; whether you look at it from the viewpoint of Four Pillars: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation, whether you’re one of those people really into the Semantic Web, whether you’re more of a Mashups person using GPS or other location-sensitive tools, whether you’re into deep dialogues and arguments about microformats or identity… it’s all about context.

Hold that thought for a minute and come for a tangential wander.

In the past, I’ve had my rants about e-mail, about spreadsheets and about presentation tools. Like with most other things, these have good uses and bad uses. For some reason, the bad uses seemed to proliferate. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation. I like working with you so much that I’m going to copy your boss in to this conversation and not tell you I’m doing it. I like spreadsheets and presentations so much I insist on reading them on my BlackBerry. I trust everyone so much that I’m going to keep online and offline copies of every version of every spreadsheet and presentation I’ve ever come near. I like you so much I’m going to show you a draft of something and then use something completely different at the meeting a day later. Recognise any of these?

Enterprise collaboration tools are by themselves fairly useless unless people actually want to collaborate, unless people want to share, unless people want to work together. E-mail and spreadsheets and presentation tools are by themselves not evil, but can be subverted into bad uses.

For many years I wondered why people did this, why people misused the tools. And I’ve only been able to come up with one logical explanation, one that fits with my belief that people are intrinsically good. You see, many of these tools came out during the 1970s and 1980s; during that time, many of the basic tenets of enterprise employment were being turned upside down; security of tenure went flying through the window; downsizing and rightsizing and wrongsizing were all the vogue; outsourcing and offshoring were being discovered; the war for talent had not yet begun.

Now the primary and secondary sectors had already been through all this, but not the tertiary sector. And within the tertiary sector, the term “knowledge worker” was just beginning to emerge. Maybe, just maybe, it was all a question of timing. Insecure people were learning that knowledge had power, while being presented with tools to protect, fortify, even submerge, that knowledge. Are they to be blamed for using the tools selfishly?

Okay, back to the context argument. Tools like e-mail and spreadsheets and presentations, because they were so individual and stand-alone, could be manipulated. And could be misinterpreted.

They did not come with context.

What we are seeing with Four Pillars tools, with Web 2.0 tools in general, is the very opposite:

• The way that conversations persist allows context to be captured and shared, whether in IM or wikis or blogs
• Modern tools for archival and retrieval, via the use of tags and non-hierarchical processes, allows context to be enriched
• The availability of location specific information, of tags and microformats, of semantic web concepts, all coupled with better identity and authentication and permissioning, allows the enriched context to be made more relevant and timely

Context. Captured and shareable. Enriched and made available. At the right time, in the right place, to the right person.

I wish it were all that simple. Whenever I see the sheer power of the tools today, I also see the stupidities. Stupidities in the context of DRM and IPR and The Series Of Tubes and and and, which have the capacity to kill this goose before any golden eggs are laid.

• what you stand for
  
• what you belong to (both blood as well as thunder)
• what you like (and what you dislike)
• what you’ve done (and what you’d like to do)

Sure there are many other things. Ways to contact you. The size of your wallet. All kinds of things that other people use to “define” you: your age, gender, marital status, number of dependents, address.

Interestingly, these mattered when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into. [If you're interested in hearing a worthwhile rant on this subject, try and spend some time with Professor Richard Scase, "Futurescase" as he gets called. I've relished the privilege.]

Today, the marketers are in trouble. Socio-economic groupings mean jack when it comes to predicting purchase propensity. Long tails weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of.

In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality.

No man is an iland.

We are going to have villages and towns and cities where the computing device is communal. Where that communal device uses opensource software and open standards and open platforms and open open open.

And we’re going to have to work out what identity means there. Not identity from a narrow financial-transaction point of view. But identity in the context of sharing information. Digital information. Letters. Photographs. Films. Music. Books. Whatever.

Communal devices. Communal devices that work when the local power grid goes down. Communal devices that don’t go obsolescent in 18 months. Communal devices that do their bit about global warming.

Communal devices.

Hey, let’s be careful out there. This is why I am so concerned about the garbage that gets one in the name of DRM and IPR. Have you really tried to use a “family” PC after Windows 95? One that three or four people use regularly, who are happy to share their files. If only they could.

An aside, still about identity. When I look at startups, one of the things that I check out very carefully is how the core team got together. Did they grow up in the same neighbourhood? Hang out in the same places? Know the same people? Go to the same university?

I’ve always felt this is important. Unless the core has some independent grounding, some reason to be together, they’re going to come apart when trouble comes their way. And every startup will hit trouble sometime in the early years.

In similar vein, I tend to check out what makes a group come together. Take America. The folk rock band, I mean, the ones who gave us Don’t Cross The River and Ventura Highway. [And Horse With No Name and Sandman, but those are not my favourites...].

Do you know how they got together? They were all sons of US GIs stationed west of London, in Ruislip, Middlesex. Their mothers were all British. They attended the same school. They broke up before they really got started, in 1969. And then came together in time to savour their success.

Just goes to show.

As with search and with syndication, we can get as technical about it as we want, and there are many places you can go to for the technical bits. Not here, I’m afraid. I still want to get through some first-principle thoughts, get some things clear in my head. Part of why I blog is to articulate nascent thoughts and opensource them in order to improve them.
Apologies if all this sounds like going over someone else’s well-trodden ground; it is exactly that; but I have found that many of these debates founder on semantics and terminology and definitions, and as a result I prefer a first-things-first approach. Please feel free to criticise or trash it. [In fact I would expect this post to attract more flames than any other I’ve done ]
The identity debate seems to encompass many disparate things, either directly or indirectly, so I’m going to just list them to begin with:

• Ecce Homo: A means of identifying who I am, with some other relatively static data, eminently suitable for “microformat” treatment, and probably needing to be combined with some other way of confirming who I am, “two-factor authentication”. Like having a card and a PIN or signature. This is as permanent as can be, a metaphorical passport or fingerprint or iris pattern or whatever. This probably includes all the numerical tags I collect like frequent flyer and affinity memberships. It can include my credit cards and accounts. It is the same regardless of the specific relational or transactional conversation I happen to be in. My gut feel is that each person should have only one of these, and that it should be “small but perfectly formed”. And that it has to exist and be verifiable in a dotorg state.
• Letters of Intent: A means of letting people know about my intentions, what I’m interested in or looking for. I make known my preferences and interests. Some of them are temporary, some of them are permanent. I choose who I want to tell. As in Doc looking for rental cars. As in my signalling to individuals in my social network that I will be within n miles of where they are at a given time. My information. Signalled to whom I want to. When and where I want to. Giving the listener an opportunity to converse with me and relate to me. Even things like last.fm are variants of this.
• Tell them Phil sent ya: A way of associating other people’s perceptions of me with me, both qualitative as well as quantitative. This is trust that I can acquire but not control. Ratings I have, whether credit or eBay or college scores or whatever. Variable over time. Not suppressible by me. But challengeable by me, so that dispute or contention can be flagged. I may have many such ratings, used for different purposes, but inspectable at the behest of the requestor. And changed as a result of the conversation.
• Trust me, I’m a doctor: A way of telling other people my own perception of me. Kitemarking my sites and blogs and articles and photos and quotes and whatever. Here what I am doing is endorsing stuff in the public domain about me, indicating (a) this came from me or (b) even though it does not come from me, I nevertheless approve it, I endorse it. This is like a great seal, a way of stamping that something is Orl Korrect. Or that Kilroy was Here.
• My name is Bond, James Bond: A licence to do something. Granted by someone else. Usually not transferable. Usually not permanent either.
• Come up and see my etchings: My choosing to expose things I have done, expired and executed letters of intent. Pictures of my activity with others. Kiss-and-tell. My information. My choice as to whom I share it with. And I can make this choice single-use or temporary or permanent. Probably even includes financial transactions and medical history.

These things by themselves are not complicated. They become complicated when people try to lock you in, to their walled gardens, their products, their platforms, their parlours. Everything here is a key to something.

And the tendency of the walled-gardeners is to force these keys to behave as if they were physical. And we need to move into the 21st century and push back. Hard. Like we had to push back on being able to choose our PINs and change them. Like we had to push back on being able to keep our phone numbers regardless of carrier or provider. Can you imagine a mail provider telling you that you couldn’t redirect mail either from or to the mail account they provide to you?

And intuitively (I may be completely wrong here) I think that the trick is to keep each of these pieces small and loosely joined a la Weinberger meets Hardt meets Sifry while Searls referees. As soon as we try to architect a humongous reference model we lose, because it’s a bit like industry standards bodies. Before you know it they get packed with people who have different agendas and the time and energy to deflect you ad infinitum and ad nauseum.

I’m also hunching that we need to prevent anyone owning this. That this whole space has to be opensource. Otherwise it will become a corrupt core.

Everything we believe is possible in terms of collaboration and co-creation and innovation at the edge, everything in my four pillars,  needs this problem to be solved.

Is the customer ready for this?

This is not a trivial point. The social and cultural aspects of such a move need to be thought out and prepared for, one of the reasons why this hasn’t happened as yet. So let’s take a look at what has been happening, but perhaps with a slightly sideways perspective.

One. We have started the process of giving the customer control of transaction execution. Any purchase/fulfilment on the web, even checking in for a flight. We have started the process of providing the customer transparency of the transaction’s status. Fedex. UPS. Amazon. eBay. Everyone’s got it. We have started the process of providing the customer transparency of information held about the customer, in terms of Freedom of Information or Data Protection or whatever. Now all we are talking about is transferring the responsibility of looking after the customer’s own relatively static information to the customer. How different is this from my being in control of my preferences for Amazon or eBay or the Wall Street Journal online. Establish who I am. Indicate what I am interested in, and not interested in. Go through some process of validating my financial status formally; an example would be getting “verified” status on PayPal. And bingo, there I am.

From a consumerisation perspective we have already taken step one of “giving the customer’s information back to the customer”. What consumer product/service providers have not yet done is step two, allowing the customer to share information about vendor A-related activity with vendor B. And this will happen. Despite the wholly predictable pushback from the product/service vendors, who lose a layer of lock-in as a result.
From an institutional perspective there is much to do, given where we are now. The vendor-lock-in argument is even more compelling here, with institutions largely unable to accept or sometimes even comprehend the implications of such a move, that of allowing the customer to share “your” activity information with a competitor. But it will happen. Only a matter of time.

Before we even go into the nature of the technology underpinning all this, in terms of identity formats and microformats, public and private keys, the nature of the encryption, the federated versus centralised models, how trust is conferred and authenticated, what kind of 1000lb gorillas are needed, the role of biometrics, the need for multifactor authentication processes, transaction guarantees and the process involved in guaranteeing, privacy protection, appropriateness of solutions for anti-money-laundering and identity theft protection and the economics of large scale provision of related infrastructure, we need to get the first question answered. Is the customer ready for this?

I can only speak for myself. Would I like to share my eBay activity with Christies or Bonhams or Sothebys? Would I like to share my British Airways activity with Lufthansa and United and Virgin? My hotel and car activity? My books and music activity? Yes yes yes.

I get to control my core “static” information. Who else knows this as well as I do? I get it verified by an independent arbiter, much like I need a birth certificate to get a passport. I choose whom I share what with.

I choose. I look after. I am the beneficiary.

That’s the key.

Then I can get all the downstream benefits of collaborative filtering and recommendations. Then my marketplaces get all the benefits of democratised reputation and rating and profiling and prediction.

A lot has to change. And will change. Provided the plan is: I choose. I look after. I am the beneficiary.