Doc Searls Weblog

12 responses to “The most important Kickstarter ever”

1. 

   Mike Grace

   November 14, 2013 at 5:13 pm

   Important distinction between Net-native and Web-native. Very excited for this project to come to fruition.

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2. 

   Christopher Carfi

   November 14, 2013 at 5:18 pm

   I’m in. Backed.

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3. 

   Christian Gray

   November 14, 2013 at 7:34 pm

   Had a great talk with Phil about Fuse yesterday and it could be a game changer… I backed it and I hope many others do as well.

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4. 

   johan

   November 14, 2013 at 7:49 pm

   2000+ characters and i still don’t know what it is?

   Reply
5. 

   Doc Searls

   November 14, 2013 at 10:50 pm

   It isn’t an “it,” johan. If you’re willing to take in a few more thousand characters, read back through Phil Windley’s blog. That should tell you plenty.

   Reply
6. 

   JW

   November 15, 2013 at 1:24 am

   I read this entire article and I come away with no sense of what the product will do for me in straight, technical terms.

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   1. 

      Doc Searls

      November 15, 2013 at 1:35 am

      Did you follow the links, especially to Phil Windley’s blog? Plenty of straight and technical terms there. Some are new, but that doesn’t make them neither straight nor technical.

      Reply
7. 

   JW

   November 15, 2013 at 1:38 am

   Just read the post by johan, who had the same complaint, and the obtuse reply. The article seems written specifically to hide and delay comprehension of what the product really is – your typical Marketing speak that says nothing specific other than a brand without meaning.

   What I actually thought htis was going into the article was software the eradicates your entire online presence if you decide to leave cyberspace. Facebook account? Wiped and deleted. Twitter? Wiped and deleted. So that no corporation can own you and your data. You have control and can choose what you allow web services to retain about your life to keep your dignity and privacy. THAT would be a product.

   This was a bad article that made me think the product was one thing when it is actually something else. To johan – it’s a product that appears to interface with your car’s computer. That’s not nearly as big a deal as owning your own data and refusing to allow web services to feel they own you.

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8. 

   Doc Searls

   November 15, 2013 at 1:56 am

   JW & johan,

   Did you read Phil’s blog? Not trying to be obtuse. Just asking.

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9. 

   JW

   November 15, 2013 at 2:26 am

   Yes, I read it after your article.

   Here’s the confusion: It is your second, bolded paragraph that makes this a misleading philosophical article which is non-specific, even etheral (detached from the real), to the product your actually trying to help. I am completely unaware of what “silo” means specific to the product because I am given no information about the product from which I can discern the context. And so the article becomes meaningless. That how I jumped to the much broader and wrong conclusion that this product was about some sort of social site control.

   There is a small group of web developers who created thehealthsherpa.com over a weekend to provide what the government couldn’t do over three year with hundreds of millions of dollars: Give people what they want up front – the details. They start with pricing whereas the government developers make you wade through an entire process before getting around to the pricing at the end. It behaves just like Marketing whose only purpose in life seems to be to obscure the details with ethereal branding jargon and make you wait until the bitter end for what it is and what it costs.

   This article’s fault is like that. Provide the real, tangible details up front and then get into the philosophical basis for the product for people who like that sort of thing. I understand the philosophical difference between an open API versus one that is proprietary and closed. But as you can tell, I lost patience because I was not told what the product really is up front. If there’s one thing I would teach the Marketing forces of the world, it is to not hide their product behind all that fluff and force people to endure non-specific text to get to what they really want – the price and the features.

   So what I’m saying is that if you want to help a Kickstarter, please get to the real, tangible, specific details first. Then have at all the fluff you want.

   Reply
   1. 

      Doc Searls

      November 15, 2013 at 9:46 am

      JW,

      Thanks for constructive criticism.

      I could have been more clear about what I meant by silo. I also think most readers would know, at least by inference.

      This isn’t an article. It’s a blog post. It’s also what I wrote in wee hours of yesterday morning, with little sleep, late in the funding window for the Fuse project. I wanted the post to help put the project over the top. I believe it did exactly that.

      It also wasn’t my only post on the topic. That’s why I also linked to the earlier one, which I believe was more specific than this one.

      Reply
10. 

    Kevin Cox

    November 17, 2013 at 12:06 am

    Phil’s system is important because it is genuinely private. Fuse knows all about Phil’s cars but there is no other organisation that can access the information about Phil’s cars. Fuse has signed up to Respect Network and if Fuse lets data leak to others without Phil’s permission then Fuse will be liable to sanctions by the Community within which Fuse operates.

    Fuse is developed in CloudOS and because CloudOS enables peer to peer interactions the communications are between Phil and his vehicles.

    Phil’s wife should be able to pull her car from Phil’s Network and, if Phil wishes, others should be able to join Phil’s Network.

    The next step is to imagine instead of Phil’s cars being connected Phil can connect other data. E.g. his bank accounts, his financial dealings with the Car Dealer, and all his other financial transactions. We then have Phil’s financial vehicles all connected and Phil promises to report all income and expenditures on which he pays taxes. There can be a trusted organisations – also members of the Respect Network – operating a reconciliation system that reports to the government all unreconciled transactions involving Phil. Phil and the government and the reconciliation system sort it out between them without the government having to know all Phil’s transactions.

    This is an alternative to the world of constant economic surveillance. We watch ourselves and report our obligations to others. We do not need others to do it. We can be trusted because the system can be trusted to report when we do not fulfil our obligations.

    It is highly likely this approach (or something similar) will prevail over surveillance because in evolutionary terms it is fitter. It is fitter because it costs less to operate and build.

    Reply