Category: Personal Data (Page 4 of 8)

Getting Respect

August 24, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Respect Network (@RespectConnect) is a new kind of corporate animal: a for-profit company that is also a collection of developers and other interested parties (including nonprofits) gathered around common goals and principles. Chief among the latter is OIX‘s Respect Trust Framework, which is “designed to be self-reinforcing through use of a peer-to-peer reputation system.” Every person and organization agreeing to the framework is a peer. Here are the five principles to which all members agree:

Promise We will respect each other’s digital boundaries

Every Member promises to respect the right of every other Member to control the Member Information they share within the network and the communications they receive within the network.
Permission We will negotiate with each other in good faith

As part of this promise, every Member agrees that all sharing of Member Information and sending of communications will be by permission, and to be honest and direct about the purpose(s) for which permission is sought.
Protection We will protect the identity and data entrusted to us

As part of this promise, every Member agrees to provide reasonable protection for the privacy and security of Member Information shared with that Member.
Portability We will support other Members’ freedom of movement

As part of this promise, every Member agrees that if it hosts Member Information on behalf of another Member, the right to possess, access, control, and share the hosted information, including the right to move it to another host, belongs to the hosted Member.
Proof We will reasonably cooperate for the good of all Members

As part of this promise, every Member agrees to share the reputation metadata necessary for the health of the network, including feedback about compliance with this trust framework, and to not engage in any practices intended to game or subvert the reputation system.

The Respect Network’s founding partners are working, each in their own way, to bring the Respect Trust Framework into common use. I like it as a way to scaffold up a market for VRM tools and services.

This summer Respect Network launched a world tour on which I participated as a speaker and photographer. (Disclosures: Respect Network paid my way, and The Searls Group, my consultancy, has had a number of Respect Network partners as clients. I am also on the board of Flamingo and  Customer Commons, a nonprofit. I don’t however, play favorites. I want to see everybody doing VRM succeed, and I help all of them every way I can. ) We started in London, then hit San Francisco, Sydney and Tel Aviv before heading home to the U.S. Here’s the press coverage:

In the midst of that, Respect Network also announced crowd funding of this button:

respect-connect-button

It operates on the first  promise of the Respect Trust Framework: We will respect each others’ digital boundaries. Think of it as a safe alternative to the same kind of button by Facebook.

The campaign also launched =names (“equals names”) to go with the Respect Connect button, and much else, eventually. These names are yours alone, unlike, say, your Twitter @ handle, which Twitter owns.

There is a common saying: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” In respect of that, =names cost something (like domain names), though not much. Selling =names are CSPs: Cloud Service Providers. There are five so far (based, respectively, in Las Vegas, Vienna, London, New York/Jerusalem and Perth):

bosonweb-logo danube_clouds-logo paoga-logo emmett_global-logo onexus-logo

They  are substitutable. Meaning you can port your =name and data cloud from one to the other as easily as you port your phone number from one company to another. (In fact the company that does this in the background for both your =name and your phone number is Neustar, another Respect Network partner.) You can also self-host your own personal cloud. Mine =name is =Doc, and it’s managed through Danube Clouds. (I actually got it a few years back. The tech behind =names has been in the works for awhile.)

The tour was something of a shakedown cruise. Lots was learned along the way, and everybody involved is re-jiggering their products, services and plans to make the most of what they picked up. I’ll share some of my own learnings for ProjectVRM in the next post.

 

 

Apple HealthKit and VRM

August 23, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Withhealthkit-hero iOS8, Apple is releasing a pile of new capabilities for developers, such as HomeKit, CarPlay, Family Sharing and HealthKit. These don’t just bring new stuff to your iPhone and iPad. Start digging and you see a framework for personal control of one’s interactions in the world: one that moves Apple away from the norms set by Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other companies that make most of their money in the advertising business.  Explains Greg Lloyd,

Google, Yahoo and others gather correlate, analyze and use personal identity metadata including your location, search history, browsing history to monetize for their own purposes or to sell to others. I believe Apple is trying to build a counter story on security using identity and services encapsulated in devices you own. In addition to continuity, examples include OS8 MAC address randomization for WiFi localization privacy and hardware partitioned storage of iOS fingerprint data.

The italics are mine. Our devices — phones in particular — are becoming extensions of our selves: as personal as our chothes, wallets and keys. They bring new ways for us to engage with people, organizations and other things in the world. There is enormous room for growth in personal empowerment with these devices, especially if those devices are fully ours, and not the hands of advertising companies in our pockets.

Apple, one hopes, aims mainly to enhance our agency — our capacity to act with effect in the world — through our mobile devices. And they have an important advantage, beyond their gigantic size and influence: we pay them. We don’t pay Google, Facebook and Yahoo for most of what we get from them. Advertisers do.

Haydn Shaughnessy unpacks the difference in The Revolution Hidden In The Apple Health Kit :

When you do business with Google, as a consumer, you strike a deal. In return for free search you get ads and for those ads you agree to your data being collected, stored and sold on. The way Apple sees business up ahead, when you use an Apple health service, Apple manages data for you, on your terms. That is a revolution.

health_iconSo, as I’ve been digging thorugh the scant literature on Healthkit and Apple’s new Health app, I’ve looked for ways they line up with VRM principles, goals and tool requirements. Here’s what I see (√ is yes, ? is don’t know. x is no — but I don’t see any of those yet):

VRM Principles

√ Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors
√ Customers must be the points of integration for their own data
√ Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
? Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
√* Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.

VRM Goals

√ Provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations.
√ Make individuals the collection centers for their own data, so that transaction histories, health records, membership details, service contracts, and other forms of personal data are no longer scattered throughout a forest of silos.
√ Give individuals the ability to share data selectively, without disclosing more personal information than the individual allows.
√ Give individuals the ability to control how their data is used by others, and for how long. At the individual’s discretion, this may include agreements requiring others to delete the individual’s data when the relationship ends.
? Give individuals the ability to assert their own terms of service, reducing or eliminating the need for organization-written terms of service that nobody reads and everybody has to “accept” anyway.
? Give individuals means for expressing demand in the open market, outside any organizational silo, without disclosing any unnecessary personal information.
? Make individuals platforms for business by opening the market to many kinds of third party services that serve buyers as well as sellers
? Base relationship-managing tools on open standards and open APIs (application program interfaces).

VRM Tools:

√* VRM tools are personal. As with hammers, wallets, cars and mobile phones, people use them as individuals,. They are social only in secondary ways.
? VRM tools help customers express intent. These include preferences, policies, terms and means of engagement, authorizations, requests and anything else that’s possible in a free market, outside any one vendor’s silo or ranch.
√ VRM tools help customers engage. This can be with each other, or with any organization, including (and especially) its CRM system.
√ VRM tools help customers manage. This includes both their own data and systems and their relationships with other entities, and their systems.
√* VRM tools are substitutable. This means no source of VRM tools can lock users in.

That’s a wishful reading, and conditional in many ways. The *, for example, means “within Apple’s walled garden,” which may not be substitutable. Greg thinks this isn’t a problem:

…many people value a safer, more consistent, curated, and delightfully designed user experience to a toolkit… I want my personal information and keys to access heath, home, car, family information stored in a walled garden in a device I own, with gated access looking in for Apps I authorize, and freedom to search, link and use anything looking out. Apple appears to be develop its stack top down, starting from a vision of a seamless user experience that just works, giving developers the extensions they need to innovate and prosper.

As a guy who favors free software and open source, I agree to the extent that I think the best we can get at this stage is a company with the heft of an Apple stepping and doing some Right Things. If we’re lucky, we’ll get what Brian Behlendorf calls “minimum viable centralization.” And maximum personal empowerment. Eventually.

I am also made hopeful by some of the other stuff I’m seeing. For example, Haydn quotes this from @PaulMadsen of Ping Identity (both of which are old friends of VRM):

Apple is positioning its Health app as the point of aggregation for all the user’s different health data, and Health Kit the development platform to enable that integration.

In this I hear echoed (or at least validated) Joe Andrieu‘s landmark post, VRM — The User as a Point of Integration.

I also think Apple is the only company today that in a position to lead in that direction. Microsoft might have been able to do it when they dominated the desktop world, but those days are long gone. Our main devices are now mobile ones, where Apple has a huge share and great influence.

Apple is also working with Epic Systems (the largest B2B tech provider to the health care business) and the Mayo Clinic (the “first and largest integrated nonprofit medical group practice in the world”). Out of the gate this has enormous promise for bringing health care systems into alignment with the individual, and for providing foundations for real VRM+CRM connections.

Of course we’ll know a lot more once iOS 8 gets here.

Meanwhile, some questions.

  • Can data gathered in the Health app easily flowed out into one’s non-Apple personal cloud or data store, and then flowed into the health care system of the individual’s choice?
  • In more concrete terms, would a UK citizen with integrated data in her Health app be able to flow that data into her Mydex personal data store, and from there into the National Health Service?  I don’t know, but I hope Mydex, Paoga, Ctrl-Shift and other players in the UK can find out soon, if they don’t know already.
  • Likewise, for the U.S., I would like to know if data can flow, at the individual’s control, back and forth from one’s Personal data vault or one’s Bosonweb or Emmett personal cloud and one’s Apple-hosted health data cloud (or a self-hosted one connected to one’s Apple cloud. And if data can easily flow from those to doctors and other health care providers. In Personal’s case, I’d like to know if data can flow through the Fill It app, which would be a handy thing.
  • For Australia and New Zealand, I’d like to know if the same thing can be done for individuals from their MyWave, Welcomer, Geddup or Onexus personal clouds. I’d also like to know if data in the Health app can be viewed and used through, for example, Meeco‘s app. And what are the opportunities for any of those companies, plus 4th Party, Flamingo and other players, to participate in an ecosystem that has any and all of the companies just mentioned, plus Medicare (the Australian national health service, not to be confused with the American one just for persons 65+)?
  • Same questions go for Qiy in the Netherlands, CozyCloud in France, and many other VRooMy developers in other places. And what’s the play for the Respect Network, which brings consistencies to what many of the developers listed above bring to the market?

In all cases the unanswered question is whether or not your health data is locked inside Apple’s Health app. Apple says no: “With HealthKit, developers can make their apps even more useful by allowing them to access your health data, too. And you choose what you want shared. For example, you can allow the data from your blood pressure app to be automatically shared with your doctor. Or allow your nutrition app to tell your fitness apps how many calories you consume each day. When your health and fitness apps work together, they become more powerful. And you might, too.”

Sounds VRooMy to me. But we’ll see.

 

Live blogging #Smalldata NYC

August 4, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I’m at SmallData NYC, hosted by Mozilla.  What I’m writing here is not a report on the event (which will be up on the Web for all to see, soon enough), but rather my own #VRM-based riffs on what the panelists (and later the audience) are saying.  The purpose of an event like this is to get people thinking and talking. So that’s what I’m doing here.

  • New word for me: deconvolve. I like it, but gotta look it up.
  • Actual and clear intent is more valuable than inferred intent.
  • Whatever happened to AskJeeves-type search?  Such as “I’m looking for Michael Jordan the AI expert, not the basketball player.”
  • Thought: Why does search have to be so effing complicated.
  • The Net has no business model. That’s why it supports an infinitude of business.
  • At the moment a common (if not prevailing) business model on the Web is surveillance-based personalized advertising. This is not the same thing as the Web itself. If protecting your privacy,  or “becoming an exile” from surveillance fails to support this business model, it does not break the model so much as provide feedback on what isn’t working — or what else might work better. And it certainly does not “break the Web.”
  • “The Industry” is an interesting term. (One of the panelists “speaks for the industry.” I think here it means “commercial players on the Web.” In Hollywood it means Hollywood. I don’t think we’re even close to that level of metonymic maturity.
  • “Small animal taxidermy is specifically an eBay problem.” I think I just heard that.
  • I like “giving a user recommendations that are out of the cone of relevance.”
  • Cone of Relevance is a good name for a band.
  • Netflix recommendations are at least partly (or largely) about developing a long-term relationship with the company. Keeping subscribers. “If you know Netflix knows you, you’ll stay.”
  • Battlestar Gallactica, by pure numbers, has high correlations with a children’s show for 3 year olds. Possibly because watchers of the show have little kids. “The math works,” but the manners don’t.
  • On break, I’m with @Deanland, who sez, “All they seem to care about is how to glean information from people for the benefit of the sell side, with no discussion or apparent thinking about what the user wants, feels, means or cares about. The data is on a one-way street from buyer to seller, but only for the benefit of the seller, not the benefit of the buyer. Saying ‘It’s about serving them better’ actually means ‘We can sell them better.’ There is also a sense that it is a given that The Machine, run by the seller, can get all this information, with no conscious involvement at all by the people yielding the information.” (Hoping Dean — and others — will bring this up after the break. We’ve only had presentations so far, not discussions yet.)
  • Also from the audience on break: “We need a personal data silo. For the person, the #smalldata holder — not the marketing machine.”
  • Wendy Davis of Mediapost (moderator) is challenging the apparent belief, by the panel,  that more information about individuals held by companies is better for individuals. (I think she’s saying.)
  • I’m a person. I want my to do my own damn personalization. Just saying.
  • David Sontag, panelist, says usage data with Internet Explorer all goes to Microsoft.
  • “People get much more upset with bad personalization than no personalization.” (Not sure I got that down right.)
  • Chris Maliwat, panelist: It’s sometimes hard to perceive a company’s intentionality.
  • All these companies are in the train business. We’re passengers, whether we like it or not. Meanwhile, what we need are cars: instruments of independence, agency and personal utility — for ourselves, following our own intentions. I believe Mozilla is the only major browser that can fill this role, because it’s on our side and not on these companies’ side. The other browsers are all instruments of their parent companies.
  • A reason people don’t get more creeped out by all this surveillance and personalization, is that there have not yet been clear, big, news-making harms. Once that happens, the game changes.
  • David Sontag: “I can ‘t get a credit card that won’t share my information with other companies.”
  • Wendy: “How do researchers get users’ true intent?” (e.g. her gender may be irrelevant to her search, but The System notes her gender anyway)
  • Chris: Personalization is not about perfection, but about providing a range of choices.
  • Wendy: “Do people actually know what they want?” My answer: yes. And the assumption that people mostly don’t know is a flaw in The System. So is the assumption that we are in the market to buy stuff all the time. If I want to know the height of Mt. Everest, that doesn’t mean I want to go there, or buy mountaineering gear, or anything commercial.
  • Pat, from the audience, on intelligibility of recommendations: Pandora has filters that are domain aware… But lack of domain makes it harder to make recommendations intelligible.
  • So far all of this is inside baseball. Except the game isn’t baseball. It’s building out the system in Minority Report. But instead of “pre-crime,” it’s all about what we might call “pre-sales.” It’s this scene here.
  • The panel conversation is currently (I think) about the user’s intent “being understood.” So I find myself channeling Walt Whitman: I know that I am august. I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood. I see that the elementary laws never apologize. Also, Do I contradict myself? Very well then. I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes… The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me. He complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. I feel one of those yawps rising in me now.
  • A question from the back of the room for “opt in, rather than opt out.” (Of tracking and all that.)
  • Chris’s reply: “Google already exists.” The point is that Google and today’s Web giants are the environment. Deal with it.
  • Audience guy: There is an imbalance between their control and mine as an individual. Right.
  • Wendy: Targeting based on zip code isn’t especially personal. But what we’re talking about here is very personal. Doesn’t this raise issues?
  • Slobodan: Maybe the Net will become more like the insurance business. (Did I hear that right? Missed the point, though.)
  • Audience guy: What kinds of restraint exists now for users that don’t care about privacy at all — as with some young people.?
  • I stirred things up a bit at the end (my barbaric yawp, you might say), but it’s over now, so I’ll need to do my own wrapping later.

Currently 9:15pm, EDST.

Okay, next day, 5pm.

I had hoped that Dean, quoted above, would be called, but he wasn’t, so I raised my hand and said that what the panel had talked about up to that point was mostly inside baseball — a metaphor that at least Chris wasn’t clear on, because he asked me what I meant by it. What I meant was that all three of the panelists were inside The Industry. And what I tried then to do was get them to stand on the other side, the individual’s side, and look at what they do from that angle. When they asked what was being done on the individual’s side, I brought up VRM development, and volunteered Kenneth Lefkowitz of Emmett Global to speak as a VRM developer. Which he did.

So that was it, or as close as I’m going to get in a blog post. When the event goes up on the Web, I’ll add the links.

A partial VRM FAQ

July 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I want to do two things here.  One is to get going on a long-form FAQ for ProjectVRM. The other is to address some of the questions about VRM that have come up, both on the ProjectVRM list, and on the recent Respect Network launch tour.

Q: How can VRM succeed when the Average Joe shows no interest in it?

A: First, there is no Average Joe. Difference is a fundamental human quality. All of us have different faces, voices, thoughts, flaws, aspirations, phobias and the rest of it. Even identical twins, both grown from the same split egg, can have radically different souls and lives.

Second, inventions mother necessities. The world is full of things that nobody wanted until they saw them, and what they could do. And, once they started using them, those things became ordinary.  Here’s Louis CK on how this happened with aviation. What began as the Miracle of Flight is now a subject of constant complaint about bad service to crowds speeding across the stratosphere.

If all future progress was based on what an average Joe would do with present technology, there would be no progress. In fact, we had exactly this with stone tools, which on the whole failed to advance — or advanced only in small ways, every few dozen hundreds or thousands of years. (For more on the present evolutionary picture, see Race Against the Machine  and The Second Machine Age, both by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.)

Step back from history, look across the decades, and ironies abound. In Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” — a song about a kind of average Joe, with the chorus “… something is happening here and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” — the final line is “you should be made to wear earphones.” Dylan wrote that at a time when earphones were worn only by audiophiles and people whose work required them. Today in a subway car, you’ll see a lots of riders wearing earbuds or headphones that look like wood clamps. All of them are plugged into devices in purses or pockets that crunch more data and run more applications than anybody working on a Univac could imagine with the tech of their day.  And at trivial costs.

The tide of tech history, over the last four decades, has been one of personal empowerment, and of corporate and government opposition to it, followed by widespread realization that personal empowerment is good for everybody.

We saw that with personal computing in the 1980s, worldwide personal internetworking in the 1990s, mobile devices that provided both in the 2000s, and now with personal clouds (aka stores, vaults, PIMS) in the 2010s. (I also spoke about this two weeks ago at Amplifyfest in Sydney.) For partial lists of early work going on in the mid-2010s, see the ProjectVRM developments list, PDEC’s startup directory and the Respect Network Founding Partners list.

Q: A lot of VRM seems to be about people managing their own data. Who wants to go to the trouble and why?

A: Everybody with a laptop or a smartphone is already managing data. They may not think of it that way, but they are. All emails, calendars, contact lists, photo albums, movies and files created with office applications (spreadsheets, text documents, drawings, financial reports, whatever) are data people manage for themselves, or with help from companies that provide the means. “Personal cloud” is a term for the place where we manage and put to use the data that’s most useful to us in various market spaces. For example:

  • fitness and health data
  • automobile performance, maintenance and service data
  • intentcasting data (what we intend to buy, but in our own space rather than in some company’s sales and marketing space)
  • usage and service data (for household appliances, utility providers — anything we own, use, care about and occasionally need support for)

Today that data is isolated in silos. Even fitness data, produced by wrist bands and phone apps, is fractioned off into many silos over which we have littler or no control. Personal clouds are where we will integrate that data and decide how best to use it. Some of those will be self-hosted, others will be provided by services. Those, ideally, will be substitutable.

Q: What about legal hurdles? Vendors and service providers seem to still be holding all of the legal cards, and the “agreements” we make are always one-sided. How can that change?

A. On this one we are still at Square Zero. But it will have to change. Inevitably. (See chapters 4 and 20 of The Intention Economy.) And work is being done on it already. Watch this space for more on that.

#VRM and the OpenNotice Legal Hackathon

July 12, 2014 / / 0 Comments

The OpenNotice Legal Hackathon is happening now: 12 July 2014. Go to that link and click on various links there to see the live video, participate via IRC and other fun stuff.

It’s multinational. Our hosts are in Berlin. I’m in Tel Aviv (having just arrived from Sydney by way of Istanbul). Others are elsewhere in the world.

It’s moving up on 5pm, local time here, and 10am in New York.

I’m prepping for talking #VRM at this link here and  this link here.

Here are some core questions we’ll be visiting.

I’ll add more links later. This is enough to get us started.

#TakeBackControl with #VRM

June 23, 2014 / / 1 Comment

That’s a big part of what tonight’s Respect Network launch here in London is about. I’ll be speaking briefly tonight at the event and giving the opening keynote at the Immersion Day that will follow tomorrow. Here is a draft of what I’ll say tonight:

This launch is personal.

It’s about privacy.

It’s about control.

It’s about taking back what we lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

It’s about fixing a marketplace that has been ruled by giant companies for a hundred and fifty years — even on the Internet, which was designed — literally — to support our independence, our autonomy, our freedom, our liberty, our agency in the world.

Mass marketing required subordinating the individual to the group, to treat human beings as templates, demographics, typicalities.

The promise of the Internet was to give each of us scale, reach and power.

But the commercial Internet was built on the old model. On the industrial model. What we have now is what the security guru Bruce Schneier calls a feudal system. We are serfs in the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Principality of Amazon.

Still, it’s early. The Internet as we know it today — with browsers, ISPs, search engines and social media — is just eighteen years old. In the history of business, and of civilization, this is nothing. We’ve barely started.

But the Internet does something new that nothing else in human history ever did, and we’re only beginning to wrap our heads around the possibilities: It puts everybody and everything at zero functional distance from everybody and everything else — and at costs that want to be zero as well.

This is profound and huge. The fact that we have the Net means we can zero-base new solutions that work for each of us, and not just for our feudal overlords.

Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.”

That’s why we are here today. Respect Network has been working to give each of us a place to stand, to take back control: of our identities, our data, our lives, our relationships… of everything we do on the Net as free and independent human beings.

And what’s extra cool about this is that Respect Network isn’t just one company. It’s dozens of them, all standing behind the same promise, the same principles, the same commitment to build markets upward from you and me, and not just downward like eyes atop pyramids of control.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this tomorrow at Immersion Day, but for now I invite you to savor participating in a historic occasion.

I’m sure I’ll say something different, because I’ll speak extemporaneously and without the crutchware of slides. But I want to get this up  because I can’t print where I am at the moment, and it seems like a fun and useful thing to do in any case.

For more, see A New Data Deal, starting today, at my personal blog.

VRM is as distributed as humanity

June 12, 2014 / / 3 Comments

VRM is for the  individual human beings we call customers.

While human beings form collective groups — families, teams, parishes, parties — what makes each of us most human is our individuality — and our capacity to grow and change.

We are all different. Even identical twins, grown from the same split egg, can be as different as male and female.

Our species evolved faces so we could tell each other apart, express ourselves differently, and live separate and unique lives. No other species has the same degree of variation among faces and voices, or has the same ability to customize personal appearance, behavior and voice, through diet, exercise, piercings, markings (such as tatoos) and other choices.

And yet we also form organizations — tribes, churches, businesses, governments — that cannot scale to usefulness without treating people as populations, groups and templates. We need these organizations to operate civilization.

But we also need our individuality. This is why we bristle when asked in a survey to provide our age, ethnicity or income group. Both asking and answering those questions insults our dignity as separate and distinct individuals: ones with dominion over ourselves, born to possess full agency in the world, and irreducible to demographic characteristics.

Humanity by its nature is also distributed. Scattered. In the computing and networking worlds — which are now the same — distributed means comprised of individual points of autonomy and control. The same goes for links between those nodes.

Paul Baran described the different ways humanity and its networks can be organized, with this drawing here —

fig1

— in this essay for the Rand Corporation on the subject of distributed communications. It was radical when it was written, in 1962, because centralized networks were the only kind. But Baran was also writing  at the height of the cold war, when the need to create the smallest possible “attack surface” was imperative. Hence the distributed design that later became the base-level nature of the Internet: as basic and elemental as chemical valency — the combining power of elements — and human nature.

This design is what David Isenberg calls “stupid” — because its purpose is to put all the intelligence at the network’s infinite number of ends (which are mostly human), rather than in the middle(s), where it is vulnerable.

Over the last decade, however, large businesses operating on the Internet, and provisioning access to it, have become increasingly centralized — or at best decentralized, but in very central ways. Visualizations of the Internet, such as this —

internet

— and this —

Internet_map_1024_-_transparent

 

— are of type B in Baran’s drawing above: decentralized, rather than distributed.

But the forces of decentralization and distribution are still with us, growing up from the Net’s own grass roots: individual geeks, working together on behalf of the Net itself, and its native nature.

Jon Udell wrote about them yesterday, pointing to this amazing list by @rossjones by way of @Jeremie Miller, father of XMPP, one of the most widespread protocols in the Internet suite. It’s far longer than our own here at Project VRM. But we will include it, because what they’re doing supports what we are doing, in the most fundamental way possible.

Lately I’ve been asked, along with many others, if there is still hope for a Net free from control by giant Net-based corporations, governments, phone and cable companies, the entertainment industry, and combinations of all those forces. On the surface it looks like the answer is no.

But looking down in the grass roots, growing upward out of the Net’s deepest and most permanent layer — also the most human one — gives me faith.

How a real customer relationship ought to work

April 19, 2014 / / 1 Comment

This post is about creating a whole new customer-company relationship system, based in what Jon Udell and Phil Windley call The Internet of My Things. This system opens up a boundless frontier of market intelligence that flows both ways: from companies to customers, and from customers to companies. It obsoletes customer service as we know it today, and brings the best of truly personal (rather than “personalized”) customer service into the Internet Age. The examples I use are of products that have problems; but this post is not about those products or the companies that made them — although I would love for those companies to participate in the paradigm shift that is about to take place.

A couple years ago I bought a pair of moccasins at a shopping mall kiosk in Massachusetts. The brand was LAMO and the name was Mens Moc: Here’s one:

I like them a lot. They’re very comfortable and warm on winter mornings. In fact I still wear them, even though they are falling apart. Here is how they look now: You can see that the leather, laces and stitching are all fine. So is the wool lining. The problem is the sole. It has dried up and cracked into pieces. Every time I wear it, chunks fall off. In fact, I first thought about writing this when a piece of a heel with a LAMO logo on it looked up at me from under my desk. But I’m wearing them now, and I’ll probably keep wearing them after the soles come off completely. I would like to help LAMO learn from my experience. As of today, here are the four main choices for that:

  1. Do nothing (that’s the default)
  2. Send them an email
  3. Go on some website and talk about it. (A perfect Leighton cartoon in the March 17 New Yorker shows a couple registering at a hotel while the person behind the counter says, “If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, just rant about it on the Internet.” So that’s a less used but common default.)
  4. Get “social” by tweeting to @LAMOfootwear or whatever they’ve got on Facebook. (I avoid Facebook and haven’t checked.) For wisdom on “social” relations between brands and (presumed) fans, see Bob Hoffman‘s recent talk.

But we can improve on that, by giving these moccasins their own little virtual cloud, where LAMO and I can share intelligence about whatever we like — starting (on my side) with reports on my own experience. Phil Windley calls these clouds picos, for persistent compute objects. They have their own operating system (CloudOS), and don’t need intelligence on board. Just scan a QR code, and you’ll get to the pico. Here’s the code on one of my LAMO moccasins:

Go ahead and scan the code with your phone. Or take the short cut and click on it. You’ll get to a page that says it’s my moccasin.

But if I scan it, I can see whatever notes I’ve taken. Or whatever LAMO has put in there, with my permission. Also whatever programming has been done on it. Such as this logic: IF this is scanned, THEN send LAMO a note that Doc has a new entry in our common journal. Likewise, LAMO can send me a note saying that there is new information in the same journal. Maybe that information is a note telling me that the company has changed sole manufacturers, and that the newest Mens Mocs will be far more durable. Or maybe they’ll send a discount on a new pair. The correct answer for what goes in the common journal (a term I just made up — we’re in tabula rasa-ville here) is: whatever.

And that’s the key to the future of customer service, customer relationship management (CRM), call centers, loyalty programs, continuous improvement and other business ideals. Go to those links (all to Wikipedia), and you’ll find most of them have “issues.” The reason they have issues is simple: the customer is not involved with any of them. They are industries talking to themselves. This is an old problem and it can only be fixed on the customer’s side. Before the Internet, solving things from the customer’s side — by making the customer the point of integration for their own data, and the decider about what gets done with that data — was impossible. After the Internet, it’s very possible, if we get our heads out of business as usual and put them back in our own lives. This will be good for business as well.

For example, last summer I had meetings with two call center companies, and reviewed this scenario:

  1. A customer scans the QR code on her cable modem
  2. This triggers a message to the call center saying “this customer has scanned the QR code on her cable modem”
  3. The call center checks to see if there is an outage in the customer’s area, and — if there is — how soon it will be fixed
  4. The call center sends a message back saying there’s an outage and that it will be fixed within X hours

In both cases they said “We want that!” Because they really do want to be fully useful. And — get this — they are programmable. Unfortunately, in too many cases they are programmed to avoid customers, or to treat them as templates rather than as individual human beings who might actually be able to provide useful information. This is old-fashioned mass-marketing thinking at work, and it sucks for everybody. It’s especially bad at delivering (literal) on-the-ground market intelligence from customers to companies.

Call centers would rather be sources of real solutions rather than just customer avoidance machines for companies and anger sinks for unhappy customers. The solution I’m talking about here takes care of that. And much more.

Now let’s go back to shoes.

I’m not a hugely brand-loyal kind of guy. I use Canon cameras because I liked the 5D‘s user interface more than the competing Nikon, and Canon’s lens prices were lower. Not because Canon photos were better. (I still prefer Nikon color, low-light performance and hand grip.) I use Apple computers because they’re easy to get fixed and I can drop into a Unix command line when I need to. I drive a Volkswagen Passat because I got mine at a good price from a friend moving out of the country. And I buy Rockport shoes because, on the whole, they’re pretty good.

Used to be they were great. That was in the ’70s and early ’80s when Saul and Bruce Katz, the founders, were still in charge. That legacy is still there, under Reebok ownership; but it’s clear that the company is much more on the mass marketing operation than it was back in the early days. Still, in my experience, they’re better than the competition. That’s why I buy their shoes. Rockports are the only shoes I’ve ever loved. And I’ve had many.

Here is a photo I just took of wear-and-tear on two pairs of Rockport casual shoes I often wear:

Shots 1 and 2 are shoes I bought in June 2012, and are no longer sold, near as I can tell. (Wish they were.) Shots 3 and 4 are Off The Coast 2 Eye, which I bought in late 2013, but didn’t start wearing a lot until early this year. I bought both at the Rockport store in Burlington Mall, near Boston. I like that store too.

The first pair has developed a hole in the heel and eyelet grommets for the laces around the side of the shoe. The hole isn’t a big deal, except that it lets in water. The loose eyelets are only a bother when I cross my feet sitting down: they bite into the other ankle. The separating outer sole of the second pair is a bigger concern, because these shoes are still essentially new, and look new except for this one flaw. A design issue is the leather laces, which need to be double-knotted to keep from coming undone, and even the double-knots come undone as well. That’s a quibble, but perhaps useful for Rockport to know.

I’d like to share these experiences privately with Rockport, and for that process to be easy. Same with my experiences with LAMO moccasins.

It could be private if Rockport and LAMO footwear came with QR codes for every pair’s pico — it’s own cloud. Customers would buy the cloud along with the shoe. And then they would have their own shared journal and message space, as well as a programmable system for creating and improving the whole customer-company relationship. They could also get social about their dialogs in their own ways, rather than only in today’s Facebook and Twitter, which are the least private and personal places imaginable.

This kind of intelligence exchange can only become a standard way for companies and customers to learn from each other if the code for picos is open source. If Rockport or LAMO try to “own the customer” by locking him or her into a closed company-controlled system — the current default for customer service — the Internet of Things will be the Compuserve + AOL + Prodigy of things. Those “online services” were as close as we could get to the Internet before the Internet itself — an open source system at its base — came along. Even sending emails from one of those services to the other was nearly impossible. Customers were captive inside silos.

One big thing that made the Internet succeed was substitutability of services. Cars, banks, and countless other product categories you can name are large and vital because open and well understood standards and practices at their base have made substitutability possible. Phil Windley says we can’t have a true Internet of Things without it, and I agree.

Far as I know, the only code ready to begin scaffolding picos is Phil’s CloudOS and KRL. But for these — or anything like them — to catch on, we’re going to need a lot more developers thinking outside the silos that comprise the entirety of Internet of Things work going on now. This post is an appeal to those developers.

By the way, Phil believes that cars are the best vertical to start out with. I think he’s right. But shoes are in front of me right now, so I’m using them as an example. And the example works for everything. Literally.

On the geofences we’re already building

March 17, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I was just pointed to the Geofencing Manifesto, “created by the audience at the SxSW 2014 workshop entitled ‘The Future Landscape of Geofencing Manifesto’ on Saturday, March 8th, 2014.” Leading the workshop were Jay Wilson (@jwsfl), Jenessa Carder (@expressanything) and Kevin Pound, all with SapientNitro, “a new breed of agency for an always-on world” that is “redefining how stories can be told across brand, digital and commerce.” Additional inks: workshop, guidelines.

I salute their good efforts. Could be they’ll get farther with this than other agencies have. There are also some existing contexts they will need to consider as they press forward with this and similar efforts. So, to help with that,  I’ll run them down:

  1. There is work already going on here, by the EFF,  Mozilla, ProjectVRM and others.
  2. The Geofencing Manifesto appears to be a marketing document. Meaning, it seems to be a form of outreach from marketing. It also frames the geofencing challenge — correctly — in the context of huge push-back against marketing by its targets.
  3. We have some manifestos already, starting with Cluetrain, which laid out the situation pretty well in 1999. It does help that marketing embraced Cluetrain rather enthusiastically, especially the idea that markets are conversations. (That was Cluetrain’s first thesis, expanded a few months later into a whole book chapter.)
  4. We are not just “consumers.” As Cluetrain put it, “we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.” Persons, people, individuals and customers are all better terms.
  5. There have never been mutual and consenting relationships between marketers and the people they call “targets,” and which they seek to “acquire,” “manage,” “control” and “lock in” as if they were slaves or cattle. For example, programs called “loyalty” involve all the words in that last sentence, and are by nature coercive. They are all different from each other as well, requiring the customer to maintain separate “relationships” with every marketing operation, which is a huge inconvenience and an industrial-age affront to the peer-to-peer design of the Net in the first place.
  6. Let’s face it: until we build those fences, and get tools of our own for managing real relationships, on our terms, all we’ll get from marketing is more respectful and conversational forms of the same old thing. Meaning it’s our job, not marketing’s.
  7. There is nothing in the history of marketing to suggests that it will work cooperatively with “consumers” to come up with something agreeable to both that will lock out all marketing intrusions. This is especially true in the Age of Data, because…
  8. Data is to marketing as blood is to Dracula. Telling surveillance-oriented marketing “Let’s work together on what we agree to let you suck from our necks” won’t get us very far in the dark and bat-filled night that the commercial Web has become.
  9. The only way to build fences that work is for us to build them ourselves, which is what we’ve been doing with ProjectVRM.
  10. Geo is an interesting angle, especially in the mobile world. I like it. Privacy in the physical world tends to be spacial, and matching that in the virtual world seems a good thing. Bonus link: Clothing as a privacy system.

So we invite Jay, Venessa, Kevin and other well-intended marketers to come check out the work already going on here and elsewhere. (A good place to start is at our development work list.) I also suggest they come as individuals and not as marketers. In other words, stand on our side of the fence. Trust me: doing that will make marketing a lot better than anything marketing can do alone, or with the help of cooperating “consumers.” (For more on the customer/consumer distinction, go here, here, here and here.)

Reporting on the Data Privacy Hackathon

February 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Data Privacy HackathonIn case you missed the Data Privacy Hackathon, held this past weekend in London, New York and San Francisco, there should be a good mother lode of posts, tweets and videos up now, or soon.

Here is a small starter-pile of links from the New York one:

  • The hackathon page.
  • #privacyhack on Twitter
  • Videos of the event, courtesy of the New York Chapter of the Internet Society.  VRM and I come in at ~ 27 minutes into the first video. Finalist hacks are presented in this video here. One of the entries, Re-entry, led by Lina Kaisey, Harvard Law School ’14, starts at about 56 minutes into the last video link, and is to some degree based on my challenge in the first video link. It came in second. The winner was Ghostdrop, the presentation for which follows Lina’s, and which allows private communications between individuals. (Re-entry does that too, for prisoners re-entering the free world, and communicating with The System).

More at LegalHackathon.net.

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