In a construction project, it is customary to prepare a punch list of work that still needs to be done, or re-done. In the years since ProjectVRM started in 2006, a lot of work has been done (and re-done) in many VRM categories, each adding to a long list on our wiki. The list below is instead a punch list of work that can only happen when individuals take the lead in dances with enterprises, and do it at scale. Stuff is happening in each of these areas. As it proceeds, we’ll update it often.
- Terms: Make companies agree to our terms, rather than the other way around. This includes making our terms machine readable., backed by simple policies, with teeth, and simple ways to resolve disputes.
- Identity: Control our own self-sovereign identities, revealing to businesses no more than what they need to know about us, on an as-needed basis.
- Authentication: Get rid of logins and passwords. (Yes, there is already work going on here.)
- Change of address: We should be able to change our surname or our home address in the records of every organization we deal with, in one move. (Here’s one way.)
- Paying for stuff: Pay what we want, where we want, for whatever we want, in our own ways.
- Zero knowledge commerce: See here.
- Customer service: Call for service or support in one simple and straightforward way of our own, rather than in as many ways as there are 800 numbers to call and punch numbers into a phone before we wait on hold while bad music plays.
- Loyalty: Express loyalty in our own ways, which are genuine rather than coerced. This will make loyalty programs mean what they say.
- IoT: Design and equip the Internet of MY Things, which each of us controls for ourselves, and in which every thing we own has its own cloud, which we control as well.
- Health and fitness: Own and control all our health and fitness records, for the good of all those who need that data, as well as our selves.
- Shared intelligence: Create a standard path for market intelligence that flows both ways, generously and with permission at both ends. This includes how products and services are used.
- Wallets: Have wallets of our own, rather than only those provided by platforms. Here’s one.
- Shopping carts: Have shopping carts of our own, which we can take from store to store and site to site online, rather than being tied to ones provided only by the stores themselves. More here.
- Truly personal mobile devices: Have personal devices of our own (such as this one) that aren’t prisoners in a corporate walled garden, or suction cups on corporate tentacles.
- VRM<—>CRM: Have real relationships with companies, based on open standards and code, rather than relationships trapped inside corporate silos.
- Learning: Remake education around the power we all have to teach ourselves and learn from each other, liberating the inherent genius of every student.
- Journalism: Remake the whole practice of no-bullshit story-telling by making it fully relevant and driven by the very people who are not only interested, but in the best position to know and tell.
- Real Democracy, where individual citizens, as well as groups, can make real contributions and have real influence.
The photo above is of a family building their summer home, in New Jersey’s pine barrens, in 1949.