Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

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Online Community Unconfernece "Its BACK!"

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I am really excited to be working with a super awesome crew of leaders of the Online Community Manager Tribe – or OCTribe.  We have been considering reviving the event and the pieces have finally come together to do it.

May 21st at the Computer History Museum

Registration is Open!
I really love the other co-organizers who are all rockstar community managers.

The conference was originally produced by Forum One and I contracted with them to help design and facilitate. That event itself grew out of an invitational summit they hosted annually on online communities.  I actually attended one of these in 2004 as a replacement for Owen Davis who I worked for at the time at Identity Commons (1).
My firm Unconference.net is doing the production and facilitation for the event.
I plan to bring forward topics of digital identity forward at the event and hopefully get some of the amazing expertise on identity and reputation to participate in NSTIC.
 
 

Mass-Educational Databases = Wrong Architecture

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[This is cross posted on the PDEC blog – http://pde.cc/2013/03/edudata/]

permrecord--tablet
permrecord–tablet (Photo credit: teach42)

 
Every day it seems there is a new story about new “big data” systems are going to make things better – but then… they just made things creepier.
 
The latest news like this came from inBloom Inc. via SXSW-Edu (on Reuters). inBloom is a newly formed nonprofit to host a massive database of student records created with $100 million in funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  The goal seems good: track the progress of students through school and use the data to improve their outcomes.
 
The records can be comprehensive and inBloom doesn’t need students’ parents to consent to have their records in the database.
 

Federal officials say the database project complies with privacy laws. Schools do not need parental consent to share student records with any “school official” who has a “legitimate educational interest,” according to the Department of Education. The department defines “school official” to include private companies hired by the school, so long as they use the data only for the purposes spelled out in their contracts.

 
The whole idea that you must have one massive educational database of all student records is an architecture of the past.
 
The core idea is right: more data about a student’s learning experience in school is good for them and could be good for the overall school system. The challenge is how it is engineered. Are students and their parents put at the center of their own data lives? Or are they in another giant system they have little control over or say in?
 
We need to empower students with their own personal clouds. They must be able to download their own student learning records. They must be able to share them with companies and services that will work on their behalf. With personal clouds and infomediaries to help, students will find educational resources/and tools that can help them fill gaps in their learning and discover communities of interest. This infomediary market approach puts personal data to use without revealing any more data than needed and only on the student’s terms.
 

Infomediary Market Model for Personal Data

 

 
In this market model the individual collects data in their personal cloud. This could be a machine in their home or a service provider they trust (they must have the right & ability to move service providers with all their data if this is truly a personal cloud service). The individual trusts an infomediary service to look into their personal cloud but does so with a fiduciary duty to the end-user. The infomediary then works on their behalf in the market place to find relevant vendors and services.  It does not reveil specific personally identifying information to prospective service providers. It helps the individual have good choices and they decide who to transact with (thus reveling personal information).
 
The inBloom project sounds like an marketing project: companies will comb through the data base, find students to approach, and sell them with “education” products. The student data is up for grabs.
 
We need a better set of policies, technologies, and products that put parents and their kids at the center of and in control of their data. This single point of failure won’t do.

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UnMoney Convergence Topics

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Tomorrow is the UnMoney Convergence – an un-conference about all sorts of topics related to money, currency, land, value, reputation, identity.
Here are the topics that people are hoping to discuss:

  • Collaborative Consumption and Sharing
  • new currencies
  • How we can work together to make the movement for community currencies stronger and more synergistic.
  • BACE Timebank- open source currency
  • What are the best ways we can move from the current debt based, imperial economic system towards a life serving, peaceful, gift economy?
  • where are the most inspiring, promising, transition currencies being conceptualized, implemented, how can we work together to help them go viral and allow people to move their money from the old system towards creating a better alternative structure.
  • Fostering robust public debate on creating “public money” so that legitimate governments can fund activities which serve people and planet rather than threaten them.
  • Deep Wealth and new currencies as an emerging language of value. A Living Systems Model of Wealth
  • The role of co-operatives in startup investment.
  • how to enable trust agility?
  • governance, mobile payments oauth/opentransact
  • Designing Intentional Community Economic Systems
  • “Co-Creating Community Economics as a Path of the Heart”
  • Working together, can we do more than just taking care than our respective unmoney “babies/pets”.
  • Going from niches to relevance.
  • Emotions in money experiments: dealing with fears
  • Crowdfinancing! technical development values based investing
  • How are other people designing an ecosystem of currencies to create engines of social action?
  • designing currencies as/like games
  • social ecosystem design and the use of currencies
  • work-share
  • micro credit;
  • time dollars
  • How to manage debt in a web based on distribution of small composable documents.
  • Ripple, Metacurrency, actual usage
  • What does unmoney tell us about changing relationships between incentives and motivation? How unmoney works as incentive and /or motivation
  • What does unmoney tell us about changing relationships between incentives and motivation?
  • How unmoney works as incentive and /or motivation
  • How do we teach about these alternative forms of currency and economics to potential early adopters?
  • Which of these different approaches are approaching reality?
  • What are the most pragmatic and useful? Who is making progress on deployment?
  • Teaching about money in a Sustainable MBA curriculum.
  • What kinds of alternative currencies are being used and thriving in local communities?
  • What are all the alternative types of currency – i.e. time banking, etc. Perspective of a young person coming of age and recognizing there are different ways to engage with money, currency and economics.
  • What is a sensible balance between social customs and accounting systems in the economics of the near future?
  • Currency backing methods
  • Mutual credit systems, small-scale democracy
  • What is the best example of alternative currency active today?
  • What is the best model that needs to be tested?
  • Where are the communities of trust willing to test a promising model?
  • Friendly Barter – A model of a cashless online payment developed with Tom Greco this last Winter.
  • How to share deeper value and wealth together and build an economy based on this sort of wealth.
  • How to share deeper value and wealth together and build an economy based on this sort of wealth.
  • Particularly interested in alternative and parallel currencies The potential for mobile phones to disrupt in the alternative currency space

UnMoney & NewWallSt

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March 11th.
TEDx New Wall St.
re-imagining banking re-built for the Information Age in Silicon Valley on a New Wall Street, as described in the attached press release, and here http://.www.TEDxNewWallStreet.org
April 24th.
UnMoney Convergence
Fosters dialogue and collaboration among the range of interesting emerging ideas around money and exchange systems and to explore connections with issues of land and property tenure. In addition to topics on alternatives to the current currency systems, we invite all who are looking at new ways to look at land tenancy and stewardship, hard currency versus energy, time and food based currencies. We are looking for synergies between folks who see the need for more grounded, materially based economics and those looking at the spiritual, energetic and values based approaches.
Register here!
Website here (might be new in a few days).

The Trouble with Trust, & the case for Accountability Frameworks for NSTIC

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There are many definitions of trust, and all people have their own internal perspective on what THEY trust.
As I outline in this next section, there is a lot of meaning packed into the word “trust” and it varies on context and scale. Given that the word trust is found 97 times in the NSTIC document and that the NSTIC governing body is going to be in charge of administering “trust marks” to “trust frameworks” it is important to review its meaning.
I can get behind this statement: There is an emergent property called trust, and if NSTIC is successful, trust on the web would go up, worldwide.
However, the way the word “trust” is used within the NSTIC document, it often includes far to broad a swath of meaning.
When spoken of in every day conversation trust is most often social trust.
[Read more…] about The Trouble with Trust, & the case for Accountability Frameworks for NSTIC