Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Acelerating Change

Eshter on the Accountable Net @ Accelerating Change

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Esther gave a great talk about the Accountable Net at Accelerating Change that is now up on IT Conversations. It is worth a listen as we look at identifiers for people on the net. I blogged it here.
This is the summary offered on IT Conversations:

There also needs to be a balance between the ability to authenticate identity and protect the possibility of anonymity.
Since the knowledge base of its users varies so much, rules for internet communities need to be carefully designed. More than one system needs to be employed in order to offer security to new users while maintaining robust opportunities for people with advanced knowledge. Regulation of the internet should be, in Esther Dyson’s words, a way to empower people to do things without giving them power over each other.

Web 1.0 and 2.0 this week

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So I have been off and about the world for a few weeks. I am finally back in the bay area and trying to recover from the nasty cold that I caught while at Accelerating Change. I had a great week at Web of Change except I was fighting the cold. I had more great meetings about the forthcoming global launch of i-names services this week in Palo Alto.
Next week will be a big week. I am going to be at Web 2.0 and just found out about the ‘alternative summit’ Web 1.0 happening simultaneously.

On Wednesday at the House of Shields and sponsored by 43 Folders and the year 1998, with generous contributions from Adaptive Path, Mule Design, WordPress, Blogger, and Flickr.
We will meet to discuss line breaks, spacer gifs, and the ability to launch links in a new browser window.
There will be beer.
Let’s make this summit more successful than the last one, please.

This is an interesting trend the creation of grass roots summits occurring as a counter point (FOO and BAR Camp) and open source alternative to giant corporate walled gardens talking about the future.

HIghlights from Accelerating Change:7 (Gamers will Save the Planet)

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This was a great talk by Cory from Second Life.
Games will Save the Planet!!! How? Playing games improves the capacity to critically filter the increasing volumes of information we are exposed to. Games give you a place to practice performance before competence. As you learn new skills you can also maintain an appropriate level of challenge. Games are full of disinformation and information asymmetry and coping with these challenges is a skill that they develop. Laziness is not tolerated in game play because they are hard. Games get harder and harder.
Education researchers are studying how game players are organizing and educating themselves in MMOG (massive multi online games) guilds. They are hoping that this research can be applied to traditional education. Games develop critical thinking goal oriented thinking. Those researching this include – Anne Gever, Joshua Fouts and Douglas Thomas. and UW – Madison Paul Gee, Kurt Squire.

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HIghlights from Accelerating Change:5 (Joi Ito)

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Highlights from Joi Ito at Accelerating Change:

The open Network means that bottom up and edge stuff can happen. He is on the board of ICANN – ‘it is broken system but fixable’ you can go there and participate (I plan to do just that this year in December in Vancouver). He asserted that “if we suck at what we do the internet will die” because it will become a cross between the cable company and the phone company.
Connecting the Culture – Creative Commons
Connecting the Content – HTML
Connecting the Network – TCP/IP
Connecting Computers – Ethernet
The killer app is people – and communication between them.
Creative Class has more similarities between itself around the world. The class differences within countries are more extreme.
Looking at file sharing as a new behavior. Instead of trying to kill it they should try to innovate new business. You don’t try to force behavior change – you create new businesses after behavior change.

Highlights from Accelerating Chnage:4 (Organizations in the Stack)

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The presentation by Tom M Malone asserted that the technology stack includes organizational forms was refreshing. He mentioned BioTeams.com
This is the stack
* Organizations
* Application Software
* System Software
* Hardware

Early stages of an increase in human freedom in business that may in the long run may be as an important change for business as democracy was for government.

This change will mean that the economic benefits of large organization economies of scale and knowledge with human benefits of small organization.

This change is enabled with new technology that has lowered the communication costs dramatically and it is driven by human values.

There are new communication tools that change how we can organize ourselves and how corporations will organize themselves.

Highlights from Accelerating Change: 3 (Finnern)

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Mark Finnern is the leader of the Bay Area Future Salon and runs the SAP Developer Network.
He talked about the enigma of modern compulsory schooling.

1. Great person
2. Great citizen
3. Somethings special

There is a fourth today to bring them up to be good consumers.
What do we learn in modern compulsory education

1. Stay in class.
2. Turn your light switch on and off.
3. Surrender your will to predestined chain of command.
4. Only the teacher will determine what is studied.
5. Your self respect comes from an observers worth of you.
6. Kid you are being watched.

Paul Graham says that in today’s world that school is kids day job. NYLF – Good to know Blog.
Looking back at the US history and factors that made it successful. One of was the end of compulsory education at the age of 13 after which they were given responsibility and came into own as citizen.
Looking ahead the Fabrication Labs with Neil Gershehnfeld you can produce anything you can think of.

Accelerating Change Highlights: 2 (Esther)

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Esther Dyson did a great thing opening her talk “I am going to lead this time like the internet – If you don’t like it go somewhere else. Do your own thing. This is what the net allows you to do.”

Governance on the Net – The best way to regulate systems is for the people loosing control someone else is loosing it. (This is the current theme of the Release 1.0) Accountable peer-to-peer as opposed to some authority that can be corrupted.
The rulesets you create matter a huge amount. You can’t just have an idea precision matters. You can’t just allow users to design the rules you may end up with the wrong set of rules. There is an evolution of competing models.
An organization that Esther is working on advising is safecount.org that is addressing cookie issues – if the decide they all should be disclosed she will continue to work with them.
Concentrated power gets abused. Power is so corrupting. Give people power to do things not power over people. Give more power to individuals and not the power of institutions.
The articulation of accountability and identity and identification.
Reliable accountability – the fact that what you did as X you are accountable today for what you did yesterday as X.
Peer to peer accountability. The less power anyone has the less it matters when they make a mistake. The mistakes that one makes matters less.

An illustrative example that was given about how market based mechanisms don’t necessarily work. This day care was having a problem with kids being picked up late. It wasn’t working for anyone -the kids would get stressed out, the daycare staff would have to stay late etc. So they decided to deal with in a market based way – $10 for every 5min you were late. This totally backfired because then it was no longer immoral to be late it was just expensive.

Accelerating Change Highlights: 1 (Jon Udell)

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I really enjoyed this conference – the people were GREAT! and I learned some new stuff.
Accelerating Change is put on by the Acceleration Studies Foundation. They are working on Awareness, Education, Research (Technological Road-mapping in particular) and Advocacy.
They are going to start doing Future Salon’s ‘in-world’ in Second Life. With this and other references and exposure to Second Life I think I will actually go exploring. Perhaps some day we can have Planetworks happen there and maybe even an identity gang meeting.
Jon Udell did a great presentations about google mapping and annotating the world. ChicagoCrime.org and Google maps pedomiters to tag good bicycle routes. He talked about how when biking and listening to podcasting the place and audio get mingled and linked.

Dodgeball and plazes currently broadcast location. Someone might do it for you – someone who spots you and takes a picture and tags you. [This resonated with Jamais’ talk on the participatory panopticon.] We leave crumbs around all the time – credit cards, EZ passes. In the transparent society how can we apply others when not applying it to us. Selective transparency and accountability always favors the powerful. Everyone will be naked all the time.
Technology is changing the meaning and experience of public places. Who gets what level of access.
Human brains do not deal well with large matrices of permissions. Who can know where I am when in control of data. Who can know my whereabouts determined by degrees in social situations.
Collaborative annotation of the planet is coming. The birdwatchers of central park use a bird register it sits in a house anyone can log an observation in the notebook – it is effectively a wiki. With the coming world you could assign and address to a tree and link a story to the address. These birders will not likely want to adopt the new technology but likely if the won’t. If the book disappears they will likely wish they had an off site backup.

We will scavenge across the dataweb to find information about upcoming events in our towns. Today in his town one walks up and down the mainstreet to view all the posters.
He mentioned an awesome site DavidRumsey.com I first saw him present at the Long Now Foundation. His map collection is amazing along with the powerful viewers that have been built to view maps of the same place over time. We will oventually be able to connect these historic maps to our locations in real time.

Live from Accelerating Change – DataTao, i-name Cell phone

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I am blogging from the soon to be open Accelerating Change Conference.
Andy gave me a ride down here and we talked about the announcement last week of DataTao.

DataTao is going to be an interoperable data hub for user controlled data. DataTao is primarily about programmatic access to an individual’s data and only has as much UI as is needed to richly support its base functionality.
So why do I call it an ‘interoperable’ data hub? That’s because DataTao is designed to act as a bridge between many of the current identity protocols. While DataTao will provide storage for people that don’t have their data stored and available from elsewhere, its main purpose is to consume and forward data from its authoritative source(s).
It is my opinion that DataTao is a necessary and required next step in the evolution of the DataWeb. While DataTao by itself is NOT a compelling application it is a needed piece of infrastructure. It will hopefully encourage and enable people to build internet 2.0 applications and maximize the leverage of those already built.
In order to drive adoption DataTao will provide some Apps that use the DataWeb for persistence in conjunction with the DataTao launch. These apps have not been finalized yet but will likely include Exchange and Mac Mail integration (Self updating address books) as well as a rich interface for person to person profile information sharing (i-share).

I got to meet Ajay of AmSoft for the first time and see the i-names being used on the a cell phone. This is push to communicate asserting preferred mode of communication.

Creating:
* Choice
* Privacy
* Control

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