Author: JP

Four Pillars: Identity: Please flame this post

There continues to be movement in the microformats meets identity space. Doc Searls’s IT Garage recently had a piece on MicroID; comments and conversations took me to Claimid as well; so the space which I always associate with Subterranean Homesick Hardt is beginning to get busier.

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.

Keep computers out of the classroom?

I look for situations where someone I like and trust has a radically different view from me on any particular subject. Because I think I can learn from it.

Here’s a recent example. Michael Schrage, someone I’ve never met, but whose works I have enjoyed reading, wrote recently in the Financial Times: The “edutainers” merit a failing grade. Now this is a guy who wrote Serious Play, a researcher in innovation at MIT, someone who has been active at all levels of education for a quarter of a century.

So I take notice. He says “What better way to breed cognitively spoilt children than sparkly tools that cater to their impatience and short attention spans?” He goes on to say “Classroom computing offers less of a bold vision than a cowardly cheat by technocrats counting on technical innovation to shield themselves from hard questions about what schools should be.”

I believe he makes three important points.

  • One, misguided early adoption could have resulted in painful write-offs: a timing issue
  • Two,  most educational software has nothing to do with cultivating character: a process issue
  • Three, technology could be used as a medium to redefine relationships between schools and communities creatively

I agree with all three points. I also agree with him that we shouldn’t make the hyperactive short-attention-span problem worse.

I infer from his article that he does not believe in Taylorist assembly-line cookie cutter approaches to  education, and that we should celebrate the rich diversity present in student humanity. My words, not his. And I agree wholeheartedly.
But despite all these agreements, I believe there is room for computers in the classroom and in the school. For the social aspect of education, for cooking-pot approaches to learning. Blogs and wikis. Networks of networks. Letting our children do things we wouldn’t have dreamt of. Let them have their magic and wonder, and let us do everything we can to protect them from hypnos and mesmer.
I guess what I’m trying to say, Michael, is I agree with pretty much everything you say about this subject bar the use of social software. In fact I think it is imperative that social software is used to reconnect the child to the teacher and the school and the community. It’s not about gadgets and glitz. It’s about connectedness and belonging and sharing and bonding. That’s what we need in schools so that learning can take place.

Four Pillars: Time for a recap

We have a Foundation.

The Foundation covers tin and wire and connectedness and storage; it deals with the bits and bytes; it is independent of vendor or device, agnostic on platforms and driven by community standards. Any device any connect mechanism any form of information anywhere anytime. All recorded and archived and searchable and retrievable.

On top of this Foundation are Four Pillars. Syndication, which pushes out information, subscribed to and personalised as needed. Search, which pulls in information, collaboratively flitered and preferenced and heuristically-improved as needed. [In both these cases information is acquired on a non-deterministic relevance and ranking basis, with training and learning being the basis of improving accuracy]. Fulfilment, which is the transaction process of discovering inventory and price for an interest, identifying the buyer and seller uniquely, exchanging value and proceeding with the logistics. Fulfilment is fulfilment for a book, a bed, a bond or a body. And Collaboration/Conversation, which is the “markets are conversations” Cluetrain glue that binds all this together.

The Four Pillars underpin the new world of information. You create, publish, receive information that you never had before. Social information, cooking-pot information. You visualise it in ways you could never do before. You move it and share it and enrich it and aggregate it and disaggregate it using tools you could never have conceived before. And you do all this with presence and location and attention and mobility. You teach it and learn it and shape it and train it. You cleanse it and repair it and fuse it and melt it. The it is information. Yes, this is a blog about information -)

And the you doing everything is not me nor my generation. All we are doing is preparing for Generation M and learning from them.

Utopia, yes. But all it needs is common sense in avoiding visible pitfalls in vendor-lock-in, in “industry” standards, in DRM and in IPR. The elephants in the room.

This needs all of us, the market participants, to work differently. Take into account the impact of opensource, understand that we have to move from geographic utility to virtual global utility, from generic utility to ever-changing vertical utility. Work out what problems are unique to us and solve them, and use the community to solve community problems. Refactor our attitude before our code. See what all this means to us as vendors, as software builders, as “IT departments”, as telcos, as regulators, even as “consultants”.

Form follows funding

I was looking for Doc’s D-I-Y IT article in Release 1.0, couldn’t find it in a shareable form and went for a ramble on the net as a result. Found Doc’s IT Conversations piece on the same subject. Read it. Again. And I saw the Stewart Brand quote again.

Form follows funding.

Fascinating.

So, when we buy opensource, what form will the output take?

I shall work on this. And delve deeper into Stewart Brand.

A coda: Doc has seen the fact that I am struggling to find the Release 1.0 article, and has sent over a copy. I hope to be able to link to it soon.

Four Pillars: Preparing the Foundations: On opensource

As part of Foundation and Empire, I have already signalled that I wanted to look at the impact of opensource on the IT construction industry (something Doc Searls covered in detail a few years ago in Release 1; I hope to link to it sometime tomorrow).

Humour me and come along for a slight detour.

In a recent post, I tried to connect up TheManInTheDoorway with Ed Byrne and Hugh Macleod, emphasising the need to de-commoditise. And today I came across this in Aqualung. DefDiff or the Definition-Differentiation model.

Now the debate really intrigues me, and will influence how I write the Foundation and Empire piece. Because there’s something I don’t understand. That’s when I can learn something.

Why do we need a model that helps us throw away internally built components and replace them with externally sourced ones, as a means of moving from differentiation to commodity? Why should we worry about the “legacy” constraints of existing APIs and formats?

I’m not questioning the process. I’m questioning the need for a new model. I think we already have a valid model.

It’s called opensource. I have always believed that opensource should never be about deep differentiation, in fact that opensource works best when the problem being solved is shared by many. When the problem is a commodity.

Maybe it’s me that’s warped. I want to commoditise the problem. Then the solution must of course be commoditised.

Once people realise that opensource is the new outsource (yes I know I’ve said it before, but so what?) then this becomes easier to grasp. [An aside: Wouldn’t you just love to go to your boss and say you’ve outsourced 50,000 part-time jobs s/he never knew you had?]

Platform and device and UI/browser independence come as standard when you buy opensource. So you don’t worry about legacy conflict, provided you have the right principles in place in the first place.

You know, sometimes I think we can rewrite enterprise IT strategy to just one line:

Make it demonstrably easier to consume opensource day after day.

You get the ability to throw away the commoditised. You get to lower maintenance costs on the soon-to-be-commoditised. If someone else gets there first your costs of acquisition are lower. You can keep concentrating on that which differentiates you.

Which leads to an interesting corollary: Only keep the problems that are unique to you. That’s a whole new subject in itself.

More later. In the meantime, Malc, Ric, thanks for taking me somewhere else in my quest for the Foundations.

Opinions, comments and flames welcome. Almost requested.