Doc Searls Weblog

IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both

1. independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and
2. better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather than theirs.

If you’re looking for a point of leverage on the future of customer liberation, independence and empowerment, IIW is it.

Wall Street-sized companies around the world are beginning to grok what Main Street ones have always known: customers aren’t just “targets” to be “acquired,” “managed,” “controlled” and “locked in.” In other words, Cluetrain was right when it said this, in 1999:

if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…

Now it is finally becoming clear that free customers are more valuable than captive ones: to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace.

But how, exactly? That’s what we’ll be working on at IIW, which runs from April 7 to 9 at the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley: the best venue ever created for a get-stuff-done unconference.

Focusing our work is a VRM maturity framework that gives every company, analyst and journalist a list of VRM competencies, and every VRM developer a context in which to show which of those competencies they provide, and how far along they are along the maturity path. This will start paving the paths along which individuals, tool and service providers and corporate systems (e.g. CRM) can finally begin to fit their pieces together. It will also help legitimize VRM as a category. If you have a VRM or related company, now is the time to jump in and participate in the conversation. Literally. Here are some of the VRM topics and technology categories that we’ll be talking about, and placing in context in the VRM maturity framework:

• Personal clouds (aka PIMS, vaults, stores and lockers)
• Privacy tech of all kinds (and privacy characteristics, such as secrecy, anonymity and autonomy)
• First person technologies, including those providing independence, sovereignty (especially around identity)
• Technologies of Us
• Personal digital assistants
• Intentcasting
• Wallets and fintech, including Etherium, DAPP, blockchain and EmanciPay
• Decentralization
• Clouds for Things (#CFTs) and/or the true Internet of Things (rather than the Compuserve of Things)
• Silo-busting
• Truly private browsing
• Investment
• Research
• Legal, including terms and privacy policies that individuals proffer
• Password management
• Co-creation of value and experience co-creation
• Surmounting bureaucracy (guidance: David Graeber’s amazing The Utopia of Rules), by both individuals and institutions
• Tech, standards and protocols. In no particular order, telehash, XMPP, OAuth, CloudOS/KRL, XDI / RDF and other graph-based protocols
• Recsuing advertising that’s not based on surveillance from the kind that is
• Verticals, including retail, automotive, health, QS/self-hacking, real estate
• Heterarchy
• APIs, including personal ones
• Trust frameworks, such as OIX’s
• Allied organizations, such as PDEC and Customer Commons

Note: Another version of this post appeared first on the ProjectVRM blog. I’m doing a rare cross-posting here because it that important.