Social Network

Why now with the Data Sharing Workshop/Summit?

Kaliya Young · March 14, 2008 · 1 Comment

Link to the Data Sharing Workshop and Summit.
There is a lot of energy right now around different ideas on how to share data across social media sites. Based on current discussions on the dataportabiltity.org lists and other places, it is clear that a range of potential standards and approaches are emerging.
The energy feels a lot like it did when Phil, Doc and I called the first Internet Identity Workshop – at that time there was a cluster of people thinking about and working on different technologies around user-centric identity. We had been meeting other conferences, but we had not spent time together to really hear different proposed approaches. They all had similar ideas. We recognized this and realized that if we brought them together, it would lead to the emergence of shared understanding and interesting alignments.
At IIW 1 the first day involved participants presenting their different approaches to user-centric identity. The second day was open space – an organized way to support critical conversations that emerged out from listening to all the presentations the day before. It was on that day that the serious conversation between Brad Fitzpatrick & David Recordon’s OpenID(1), Johannes Earnst’s LID, Drummond Reed’s xri/inames all had a conversation that lead to a commitment to meet up a month later and that conversation became Yadis – a group that was joined by SXIP a few months later and then a few months later this was all folded in and became OpenIDv2.
Another outcome of the Internet Identity Workshop has not matured yet but it is coming along. The card selector metaphor, interfaces and client code to do it are starting to be tested and deployed. The cooperate between Kim Cameron and his Microsoft team with IBM and the Higgins & Bandit open source projects has been fostered at these events. The OSIS (Open Source Identity System) Project and Concordia projects are both doing workshops interoperability testing at the forthcoming RSA conference. OSIS has over 200 test in their Interop. The range of actors (standards efforts, open source projects, commercial projects and companies) collaborating is impressive.
Phil, Doc and I didn’t know that these would be an “outcomes” of the event and certainly did not have it as a “goal.” What we did know was that by getting people together to share their ideas, technology approaches and standards, some good would happen – that is, collaboration, synergy and actual investment in and diffusion of user-centric technologies. We also chose a format with open space that left an open playing field – we were not deciding who got to talk, about what or when. This explicitly neutral unpolitical way of organizing also facilitated the collaborative environment.
My goal for the 2nd Data Sharing Summit is to bring together participants from
1) the large companies with 10s of millions of users like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook, AOL, Amazon, eBay etc.
2) Small and Medium sized ‘web 2.0’ sites like LinkedIn, RapLeaf, Eventful, Dopplr, Linquia, Dabble, 30Boxes, Magnolia the whole range of Web 2.0 startups that are focused on services for people that involves peoples data.
3) The Standards Guys (Both adhoc and formal) Those putting forward a range of different approaches being proposed for managing the personal data/social network problem. This includes people from the user-centric identity efforts, semantic web standards and tools,
4) Social/Legal/Policy Implications Those thinking about and addressing the social and legal implications of the emerging technologies.
Bringing this range of people together will be key ingredient to getting this gathering be fruitful – I know because of who they are and the passion they have for the topic it will be. I am not going to define ahead of time “what the fruit looks like”
My hope is that there are some similar approaches that can discover each other “now” rather then a year from now when they are ‘going to market’ and decide to cooperate and merge efforts sooner rather then later (like happened with OpenID).
I asked two colleagues who will be attending what he thought the goals were:
* To establish shared consensus about the meaning of data sharing and portability for Internet users.
* To articulate a roadmap for how this can be achieved (and for determining “when we are there”).
* To understand what parts of this roadmap are technical and which are business/social/political/legal.
* To understand which technologies are available and which are emerging to achieve the roadmap.
* To determine how to move forward on the business/social/political/legal challenges.
* get disparate orgs ot work together
* get consensus on standards – and feedback
* identify missing standards
* get testing and compatibility labs -set up!
* and from an evangelistic POV – get Opt-In include din all systems
I think all of these will move forward in the format of Open Space and the collective participation and discernment at the beginning middle and end of the conference.
You can add goals here.
When I think about this gathering the big questions include:
* how do people link their information together across platforms with different services?
* how are permissions managed?
* what are the policies that apply?
* what standards exist?
* what code / frameworks are available to do this?
* what does it mean when my blog is the center of my network?
* is there a standard way to update presence?
* how do the identity tools (openID, oAuth, card selectors, data linking) apply?
* how do semantic web frameworks apply?
I hope to create a high-level professional community that is very engaged with these issues because they want to empower their users to have a copy of their data, to be aware of how it is used and to be able to use their data in interesting ways.
I also hope that a community will emerge that will work together, compete over different options and in the end solve the challenging set of problems that need to be addressed to get data sharing to work.

Porn Spam App infects Facebook and "no one" cares?

Kaliya Young · March 9, 2008 · 4 Comments

Mary Hodder has a post up titled: Trashing Our Social Relationships (with Porn) to Get Your Numbers Up. It is quite insightful about the issues that aries when investment is based on ‘numbers’ rather then qualities of relationship.
This situation expresses clearly the social ‘issues’ that arise with the ‘open identity layer’ or ‘social layer’ or meta-systems. The kinds of behavior enabled via the social graph being ‘traversable’. I hope that some reason can prevail and the acceptable norms can emerge soon.
I wonder how open standards for portable social network information will deal with these problems.
The Porn picture app this is what happens:

Nothing “happens.” Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It’s trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.
So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month — guys, it’s a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)
After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.
Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, “There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send.” Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I’d have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.
Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the “governing” body, Facebook makes the rules and “Slide wouldn’t be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren’t forced to as well.” In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn’t want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.
Also both companies told me that blogging doesn’t affect them, because they don’t read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don’t look at problems that a single person discovers.
So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.
And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.
Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.
Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That’s really messed up.
In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.

So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what’s going on)? Why aren’t Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can’t do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he’s kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn’t he know better than this?
Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: “At least 15 million minutes wasted” from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?
I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can’t trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.

COMMENT FROM ROBBIE:
Well, I remember having a conversation … Facebook as a whole, and a lot of people in general, were persuaded by the argument that You don’t want to get into legislating moral behavior. And really, it’s bad enough in government, but its more than just odd to put that kind of responsibility in the hands of programmers, its a horrible nuisance for those people that just want to build web applications.
But now they are on the long slope after achieving market dominance … they have to go back and tune all this stuff. Since they didn’t sell the company, they might not have a conflict of interest in restricting and redesigning the ACLs.
thanks,
Robbie

Olympic Athletes have 'right to blog' (with restrictions)

Kaliya Young · February 16, 2008 · 1 Comment

I have a posts in the wings about my experience of ‘security’ at Olympic like events – I participated in ‘the system’ for a few years of my life while on the Canadian National Water Polo Team.
I just found on slashdot. The restrictions they are putting on athletes freedom of speech. I was forced to sign a big legal agreement about what I would and wouldn’t do before i could attend the Pan American Games as an Athlete.
Is it the tone of things to come? Will people who attend certain kinds of events be forced to sign away their right to write about them to attend?

The IOC has given athletes the right to blog at the Beijing Games this summer, a first for the Olympics. They’re allowed, as long as they follow the many rules it set to protect copyright agreements, confidential information and security. The IOC said blogs by athletes ‘should take the form of a diary or journal’ and should not contain any interviews with other competitors at the games. They also should not write about other athletes. Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events. Athletes must obtain the consent of their competitors if they wish to photograph them. Also, athletes cannot use their blogs for commercial gain.”

That part at the end is just insulting to athletes too. If they made any money it wouldn’t be ‘that much’ and after a life time of sweat and training for the love of their sport. It would be a small gift. The whole system is set up to make money off athletes – they (the IOC) sells their performance to corporations to used to promote their products and services (worse still junk food (McDonalds) and sugar water (Coke) to the worlds children). Then some of that money goes to the National Olympic Committees. It bearly makes it back to the athletic programs that need money to train and prepare for the games. The budget of my National team was lower then that of my college varsity team. Mean while as an athlete – you make below what you would in a minimum wage job with the stipend they give you. I trained in Montreal and so couldn’t really supplement that with ‘work’ as I didn’t speak French and besides training takes up your life.

On Openness and the Open Social Network

Kaliya Young · January 16, 2008 · 1 Comment

Many years ago when I first me the guys doing “user-centric identity” – way back in the day in 2002-2003 – yes there were people talking about thinking about and exploring the implications of interoperable social networks BEFORE Friendster “happened.” I clearly remember a conversation I had with Owen Davis (one of the original founders of Identity Commons v1) about how if there really was to be an identity layer of the web that would work for people – that “the people” would need to be involved in making it happen. They explored really experimental ideas for organizational forms thinking about how to give membership for all those who had identities in the system. They had a recursive membership problem. Needed members didn’t have any couldn’t decide who was members…..sort of crazy making.

Owen always highlighting the importance of the conversations about the social network and identity portability being open so that a wide range of view points and considerations can be a part of making it real.
I remember this often when we put on our gatherings Internet Identity Workshop and the Data Sharing Summit – I worry that we don’t have a broad enough spectrum of humanity in the room to get it right. We just founded Inclusive Initiatives at this last IIW (it got applaud from the whole audience when we announced it) to focus providing opportunities to learn about, engage with and include a wider range of people with needs from and identity layer we haven’t got in the mix yet. We are having our first conference call on Monday or Tuesday.
It is not just about hackers hacking up some code. Code is “Law” and it also in the realms of people and their information about relationship it is the “social fabric”. People are participating in multiple contexts with very different norms. It is important that there is sensitivity to peoples needs that these not all merge together. The post before this one is an essay that I wrote last year for Web 2.0 Expo. It highlights some of the complexities found in the social nature of identity – and personally identifying information.
Bob recently said this in a post about opening the social graph:

My Burton Group colleague Mike Neuenschwander is fond of saying that our generation is using computer geeks – the least social people on the planet – to design social systems. This is the kind of thing he’s talking about.
Opening the social graph will destroy social networks, and turn them into sterile public spaces in which formation of meaningful and intimate relationships is not possible. Opening the social graph is a bad idea. Relationship information is not the property of individuals – it held in joint custody among all parties in a relationship, and it cannot be used or disclosed in violation of the rules under which it was brought into the relationship – or else the relationship will die and the individuals in it will be harmed. If you don’t understand this, or come to understand it, you will never have any real relationships, and neither will the software you write.

I don’t necessarily agree that computer geeks are the “least social folks” (I quite enjoy socializing with you). I do think it is true that computer geek social culture does not reflect the diversity of human culture in this world that this social layer of the internet must be inclusive of if it is to be successful.
Ben Laurie Makes this point in response to Bob’s Post:

when I share social data, I do so under certain conditions, both explicit and implict. What I care about, really, is that those conditions continue to be met. I don’t really mind who does the enforcing, so long as it is enforced. So, it seems to me that its OK to create the social graph, you just have to be exceedingly careful what you do with it.
This presents two, in my view, enormous technical challenges. The first is dealing with a variety of different conditions applying to different parts of the graph. Even representing what those conditions are in any usable way is a huge task but then you also need to figure out how to combine them, both when multiple conditions apply to the same piece of data (for example, because you figured it out twice in different ways) or when the combination of various pieces of data, each with its own conditions, yield something new.
Once you’ve done that you are faced with a much larger problem: working out what the implicit conditions were and enforcing those, too. The huge adverse reaction we saw to Facebook’s Beacon feature shows that such implicit conditions can be unobvious.

I do think it is pain in the butt to ‘re-invite’ my friends – are there ways to ‘re-invite them’ but not via e-mail? – are there ways to leverage the work that Liberty Alliance has done on the People Services Spec. from what I could discern from presentations I have seen it has promise to meet the needs articulated.
One way to deal with the issues I talked about regarding multiple contexts is to actually make the concept of Limited Liability Persona’s.
No doubt people need to be able to look at their whole social graph – who are all the people I am connected to – my address book and get information about them and the contexts I share with them. This does not mean i have one public open social graph.
This is what some of the original graphics of the Social Physics project communicated was their goal.

Looking in the Way Back Machine I found this American Revolution 2 from 2004 …quite inspiring it begins.

Today we are not full citizens of the Web. We have no effective voice in how our digital selves are captured, stored, represented, bought and sold. In short we have no voice in how that most precious and precarious aspects of ourselves, – our multiple digital identities- are governed.

Social Physics – all those concepts and understandings of how identities for people work across multiple contexts is all being woven into the Higgins Project (at Eclipse). Participants in developing this framework (and other working code relevant to the problem) are noticeably absent from the upcoming invitation only gathering on the subject of the Social Graph.
Higgins IS:

• Higgins enables the use of the card metaphor to support a consistent mechanism for authentication across all devices/platforms
• Higgins enables diffusion of this metaphor by providing toolkits for implementation of IdP’s and RP
• Higgins Solutions (made up of Higgins components) can be used to implement this new highly connected world.
• The Identity Attribute Service Solution makes it easier to build applications that leverage identity information from multiple sources (with the appropriate privacy controls of course.)
• Because Higgins is open source, it makes diffusion easier.

Yeah it has taken a while. It also takes a while to build infrastructure in the real world at has the potential to scale to internet size.
I figured out how to think about what ‘infrastructure is in internet realm’ around the time the i-name registry opened in the summer – it took so long cause it is like building a major bridge. I watch the bridge they are building over the Bay grow – it has guys working on it all the time – I watch it grow bit by bit when I ride the bus. It is SLOW but it happens and when it does you have a great highway to go over the water (rather then alternative forms – a boat, or how about an the current decaying earthquake prone span).
One of the reasons I (and the whole community) have worked so hard to create open accessible events like the Internet Identity Workshop and the Data Sharing Summit it that this layer and the issues are to important not to be dealt with in open fora. Those who want to be there to participate and help out to tackle the tough questions – to be free to put forward their ideas, solutions and working code. You know Open Source like. There is always someone interesting who shows up – you didn’t know who contributes something great.

Identity Commons is open, inclusive, and bottoms-up, and all of us abide by a set of principles to help assure this. We provide a minimal structure for supporting community activities, and we hold space for the entire community to collaborate.

The vision of an Open Social Network – one working on open standards that really empowers people AND balances the tension between individuals and the communities they are in is one I am passionate about. I wouldn’t have spent the last 4 years of my life working on building a community to focus on these issues.

The purpose of Identity Commons is to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities.

Please join us in figuring this challenge out. Many of us have put a lot of work into getting to where we are now and there is a long way to go. As Bob said Gerry said after IIW in December “We reached the end of the beginning.” This is evidenced by efforts like Dataportability.org popping up building on the foundations we have laid.
Our next IIW is May 12-14 in Mountain View again. They are a lot of fun please join us. I hope we can have a Data Sharing Summit before that and hopefully some other open outcome focused collaborative events around other aspects needed to make this all more of a reality.
(if you want to comment please just e-mail me – long story my tech has not gotten OpenID working on this WordPress blog yet).

Social Networks are Portable for who?

Kaliya Young · November 24, 2007 · 1 Comment

You know I appreciate the spirit and enthusiasm of the ‘bootstrapping’ way. I also personally don’t think it is going to work for the vast majority of web users. The reason FOAF and XFN have not taken off is that they don’t really deal with privacy and personal preferences of the people in those networks.
I like most women can’t be in the skype directory.
REALLY? you ask.
Yes this is true.
Why?
Because we get skype stalkers. Our personal information being available in very public places well makes us vulnerable.
I appreciate the young male hacker bootstrapers who believe we can just put it all in ‘simple’ microformats and have it “work”. I think they are being naive and overly simplistic about the complexity of me and my persona’s and my contexts and the nature of the social links I have with my ‘friends.’
I hope we can talk about ways to achieve some of the goals I think we all share but don’t expose me and my friends in ways I don’t want to be at IIW the first week of December.
COMMENT:
While I agree with your concerns, I believe that if and when this picks up properly, most people will probably end up setting up a linked-in type of system where you decide how much information you want to share with who. This should enable you to protect your information from the anonymous world of the net, and it would enable your real and virtual friends to benefit from microformats, openID and whatever else is around and yet to come. Anything else would be worrying indeed.
Regards,
Matthias
MY REPLY:
Thanks Matthias,
I think we are agreeing. To my knowledge there is no way with simple microformats to decide how much information you want to share with who. It is all just out there in HTML and if someone has you in their network and they export it in that format – where ever they take it well
1)you don’t know where it went
2) you don’t know who they are sharing it with
3) Their terms of service etc.
When someone can explain to me these functionalities working in a scaleable way across social network contexts I will ‘believe’ until then I just don’t see it working.
I have been a fan of XRI/XDI from early on because they are more complex open standards that could allow me to state clearly who can have access to what information about me with in the protocol. They are actually in use by a network of women highly concerned about who has access to their data and under what terms. La Leache League International (this it the breast feeding mothers of the world) is using them to have SSO and data sharing throughout its network.
COMMENT FROM CHRIS MESSINA:
Hmm, of all the formats for specifying relationships (there aren’t
that many) XFN is probably the one most widely deployed. However,
that’s besides the point.
The format that represents the relationship should not control access,
and so you’re actually talking about two orthogonal issues. For
example, the photos that you store in a webpage using the img tag
don’t specify who can see them; that’s a higher order issue that is
done with server-level controls.
I think XFN is definitely part of the solution, along with OAuth —
which can sheer off parts of your identity profile and list of
relationships for different parties, putting it completely under your
control what data is shared with whom.
As it is now, there are few applications that actually support what
you’re talking about in terms of giving you fine grained control over
your relationship lists… It’s something that I hope is coming down
the pipe but is not something that has to do with the format; instead
it’s all about consistent citizen-centric access controls over their
data.
Chris
UPDATE from DRUMMOND REED:
He explains on his blog more about XRI / XDI and how they work to solve the problem of information sharing and portability.
COMMENT FROM LION KIMRO:

I often wonder: “Is life better when people refuse to share their
myriad faces?”
I understand why we do it, but I am not convinced that the answer is yes.
Asymmetry is a problem, but I want to understand more about the
stalkers, accountability, and changing concepts of justice, before I
commit myself one way or the other.
I use my real name in all places online. When we have better
technologies of search and aggregation, I will be distrustful of
people with blank spots in their online presence. Is this good or
bad? I don’t know.
“You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” Well, maybe we
will grow, as a planet. I am open to that.
See also: Say Everything