A beckon for Beckn

Want to place a bet on where VRM will finally take off? Try India.

Because India is home to the Beckn protocol: one that enables peer-to-peer e-commerce at scale without the big platforms taking a large cut of the pie just for matchmaking. The possibilities are endless and extreme—especially for customers and small businesses.

Beckn is open source (here on Github),  moving into deployment, and expected to grow toward ubiquity on the same slope as Aadhaar, the government ID now held by 1.35 billion people.

To put this into perspective, India has more people than all of Europe (even when you throw in Russia and Turkey), and more than twice the population of North America. Only China has more people, but India is ready to overtake it in just four years.

We will discuss all this and more with Sujith Nair this coming Monday, 20 February, from 2-3:30 PM Eastern Time.  He is the CEO & Co-founder of FIDE.org, the nonprofit behind the Beckn protocol, and may have the clearest vision in the world toward an e-commerce future that isn’t contained inside big tech’s walled gardens: ones in which every business and every customer can operate with both independence and minimized friction.

This will kick off the Workshop’s next Beyond the Web salon series . Stay tuned for more in the coming months, but be sure to catch this one. It could hardly matter more for what our project has worked toward since 2006.

It’s both in-person and online, and free. But you need to register. Do that here.

ESC

VRM Day had an extraordinary outcome this time: a movement to end surveillance capitalism.

The movement began with a talk by Roger McNamee titled Saving us from Big Tech: the Gen Z Solution. It was the latest in the Ostrom Workshop‘s Beyond the Web salon series, which on this occasion took place live and in person simultaneously in the Computer History Museum‘s Boole room and on the Web via Owl and Zoom, through the Workshop at Indiana University, where people also participated in a room and virtually. You can see the first hour of the talk here.

The conversation with Roger was super-energized, continued well past the scheduled hour, and onward through breakout sessions on each of the three days that followed at the Museum during IIW, and since then on Signal and Zoom. The conversation informally called itself “Roger and We,” and it vectored toward what it says on the t-shirt design above, drawn on a whiteboard during the third of the IIW sessions: End Surveillance Capitalism or ESC. (Also implying ESCape). One of us at the session created this graphic—

—and used it to create this t-shirt at Zazzle.com:

He’s bought a number of them, so far, because when he wore the first to Thanksgiving dinner, other people there also wanted one. In the spirit of freedom and openness, please feel free to use the same graphic (which, if you drag it off, is quite large ), or something like it, to make one or more of your own. Or run with it any way you please. Movements work that way.

This is where I pause and thank Shoshana Zuboff for making surveillance capitalism a full-sized Thing. Also to Brett Frishcmann and Evan Sellinger for explaining what it does to all of us, personally.

Where this goes is up to the group, which is small, growing, and gathering weekly in virtual space while corresponding asynchronously as well. It’s still small but growing.

To succeed, its fire needs to be so large and hot that profiting by tracking people will fail because neither people nor regulators will put up with it. It is also sobering to know that similar efforts to end surveillance capitalism have faltered in the past (which is still now), in spite of the simple fact that spying on people without their clear invitation (not mere “consent”) or a court order is wrong on its face, regardless of the purposes to which that spying is put.

We talked about lots of other stuff during VRM Day, of course. For example, Don Marti led a session on the W3C’s Private Advertising Technology Community Group, which he encouraged everyone in the room to join. (Please do.)

But the main outcome was ESC.

Now, some background for those not familiar with ProjectVRM.

From its start at the Berkman Klein Center in 2006, ProjectVRM has had (says here) “the immodest ambition of turning business on its head — for its own good, and for everyone else’s as well.” Perhaps ESC will be the thing to do that, after sixteen years of encouraging countless other efforts, some of which are listed here. (There is no easy way to keep up with all of them.)

If you’re interested in joining this cabal, write to me (the email is doc @ my last name dot com). You can also follow along on the ProjectVRM mailing list.

 

 

Toward better buy ways

For sixteen years, ProjectVRM has encouraged the development of tools and services that solve business problems from the customer side. This work is toward testing a theory: that free customers are more valuable—to themselves and to the businesses they engage—than captive ones. That theory can only be tested when tools for doing that are in place.

We already have some of those tools. Our big four in the digital world are the browser, the phone, email, and texting. In the analog offline world, our best model is cash. From The Cash Model of Customer Experience:

Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with cryptocurrencies). Cash has also been working this way for thousands of years. But we almost never talk about our “experience” with cash, because we don’t need to.

The problem with our four personal digital tools—browser, phone, email and texting—is that they are not fully ours. So our agency is at best compromised. Specifically,

1. The most popular browsers are also agents of Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus countless thousands of third parties inserting cookies and other tracking instruments into our devices.
2. Our phones are not just ours. They are corporate tentacles of Apple and Google, lined with countless personal data suction cups from unknown surveillance systems. (For more on this, see Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I and Part II.)
3. Apple and Google together supply 87% of all email software and services. Apple promises privacy, while Google makes a business out of knowing the contents of your messages, plus every other Google-provided or -involved piece of software reveals to the company about your life. As for how well Apple delivers on its privacy promises, look up apple+compromised+privacy.
4. The original messaging service for phones, SMS, is owned and run by phone companies. Other major messaging, texting and chat services are run entirely by private companies.
5. Among common Internet activities, only email and browsing are based on open and simple standards. The main ones are SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 for email, and HTTP/S for browsing. Those share the Internet’s three NEA virtues: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them.

This is important: If a product or service mostly works for some company, it’s not yours. You are a user or a consumer. You are not a customer; nor are you operating with full agency in a truly free market. So, while it is obvious that all of us are made more valuable to business, and to ourselves, because we use browsers, phones, email, and messaging, we can’t say that we are free while we do.

But the Internet is still young: dating in its current form—supportive of e-commerce—since 30 April 1995, when the NSFNET (one of the Internet’s backbones) was decommissioned, and its policy forbidding commercial traffic on its pipes no longer stood in the way. The Net will also be with us for dozens or hundreds of decades to come, with its base protocol, TCP/IP, continuing to support freedom for every node on it.

More importantly, there are many business problems best or only solved from the customer side. Here is a list:

1. Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves by revealing to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement.  (Which also goes by many other names. The latest is Web5.) The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale. Note that there is a LOT happening here. One good way keep up with it is in the Identisphere newsletter.  You can also participate by attending the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshop, which has been going strong since 2005.
2. Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.
3. Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones that companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.” The solution here is terms individuals can proffer and organizations can agree to. The first of these is #NoStalking, and allows a publisher to do all the advertising they want, so long as it’s not based on tracking people. Think of it as the opposite of an ad blocker. (Customer Commons is also involved in the IEEE’s P7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.
4. Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to support), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however, they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called EmanciPay. Its promise for the music industry alone is enormous.
5. Intentcasting. Advertising is all guesswork, which involves massive waste. But what if customers could safely and securely advertise what they want, and only to qualified and ready sellers? This is called intentcasting, and to some degree, it already exists. Toward this, the Intention Byway is a core focus of Customer Commons. (Also see a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)
6. Shopping. Why can’t you have your own shopping cart—that you can take from store to store? Because we haven’t invented one yet. But we can. And when we do, all sellers are likely to enjoy more sales than they get with the current system of all-silo’d carts.
7. Internet of Things. We don’t have this yet. Instead, we have the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on, each silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent operators, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet for us to control what’s known about them. They can be, or have, picos.)
8. Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in a position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
9. Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watch our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
10. Customer service. There are no standard ways for customers and companies to enjoy relationships, with useful data flowing both ways, and for help to come when it’s needed. Instead, every company does it differently, in its own silo’d system. For more on this, see # 12 below.
11. Regulatory compliance. Especially around privacy. Because really, all the GDPR and the CCPA want is for companies to stop spying on people. Without any privacy tech on the individual’s side, however, responsibility for everyone’s privacy is entirely a corporate burden. This is unfair to people and companies alike, as well as insane—because it can’t work. (Worse, nearly all B2B “compliance” solutions only solve the felt need by companies to obey the letter of a law while ignoring its spirit. But if people have their own ways to signal their privacy requirements and expectations (as they do with clothing and shelter in the natural world), life gets a lot easier for everybody, because there’s something there to respect. We don’t have that yet online, but it shouldn’t be hard. For more on this, see Privacy is Personal and our own Privacy Manifesto.
12. Real relationships: ones in which both parties actually care about and help each other, and good market intelligence flows both ways. Marketing by itself can’t do it. All you get is the sound of one hand slapping. (Or, more typically, pleasuring itself with mountains of data and fanciful maths first described in Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics, written in 1954). Sales departments can’t do it either, because their job is done once the relationship is established. CRM can’t do it without a VRM hand to shake on the customer’s side. From What Makes a Good Customer: “Consider the fact that a customer’s experience with a product or service is far more rich, persistent and informative than is the company’s experience selling those things, or learning about their use only through customer service calls (or even through pre-installed surveillance systems such as those which for years now have been coming in new cars). The curb weight of customer intelligence (knowledge, know-how, experience) with a company’s products and services far outweighs whatever the company can know or guess at. So, what if that intelligence were to be made available by the customer, independently, and in standard ways that work at scale across many or all of the companies the customer deals with?”
13. Any-to-any/many-to-many business: a market environment where anybody can easily do business with anybody else, mostly free of centralizers or controlling intermediaries (with due respect for inevitable tendencies toward federation). There is some movement in this direction around what’s being called Web3.
14. Life management platforms. KuppingerCole has been writing and thinking about these since not long after they gave ProjectVRM an award for its work, way back in 2007. These have gone by many labels: personal data clouds, vaults, dashboards, cockpits, lockers, and other ways of characterizing personal control of one’s life where it meets and interacts with the digital world. The personal data that matters in these is the kind that matters in one’s life: health (e.g. HIEofOne), finances, property, subscriptions, contacts, calendar, creative works, and so on, including personal archives for all of it. Social data out in the world also matters, but is not the place to start, because that data is less important than the kinds of personal data listed above—most of which has no business being sold or given away for goodies from marketers. (See We can do better than selling our data.)

All of these, however, are ocean-boiling ideas. In other words, not easy, especially without what the military calls “robust funding.” So our strategies are best aimed toward what are called “blue” rather than “red” (blood filled) oceans. One of those is the Byway (or “buyway”) project by Customer Commons, in Bloomington, Indiana. An excerpt:

There are three parts to the Byway project as it now stands (in July 2022): an online community (Small Town/mastodon), a matcher tool (Intently), and a local e-commerce “buyway.” (For more on that one, download the slide deck presented by Doc and Joyce at The Mill in November 2021. Or download this earlier and shorter one.)

We also see the Byway as complementary to, rather than competitive with, developments with similar and overlapping ambitions, such as SSI, DIDcomm, picos, JLINC, Digital Homesteading / Dazzle and many others.

Joyce and I, both founders and board members of Customer Commons, are heading up to DWeb Camp in a few minutes, and plan to make progress there on Byway development. I’ll report here on progress.

[Later…] DWeb Camp was a great success for us. We are now in planning conversations with developers and others. Stay tuned for more on that.

Democracy vs. Surveillance

That’s the choice. We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

That’s what Shoshana Zuboff says, in The Coup We Are Not Talking About.

What we have now—and have fallen into, largely unawares—is a surveillance society. We do not have democracies of the kind that the U.S.  founders would want us to have. We do not even have the democracies we had, flawed as they all were, prior to our digital age. Specifically, Shoshana says, our lives are now governed by

surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge.

In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures.

Shoshana is the one who introduced surveillance capitalism into the lexicons of economics, social studies, policy, and other fields. Her book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (Public Affairs, 2019) is an international bestseller now in 23 languages, and essential reading for everyone involved in this fight.

And she will be with us to talk about this coup, and how to fight it, at the Ostrom Workshop’s Beyond the Web Salon one week from today, at 2pm Eastern Time. It’s free and you can get on at that link.

If you’re already fighting this coup (which we’ve been doing, in our own many different ways, in ProjectVRM), or if your own life is affected in any way by the struggle to break free of creepy systems that trash our privacy and nudge us into warring tribes, this is a can’t-miss event. See you there.

Salon with Robin Chase

Robin Chase, co-founder and original CEO of Zipcar and author of Peers Inc: How People and Platforms are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism, will speak at the Ostrom Workshop s Beyond the Web Salon Series at Indiana University at 2:00 PM Eastern this coming Monday, February 7, 2022. The event link is here, where you’ll also find the Zoom link.

The full theme of the salon series is Beyond the Web: Making a platform-free online marketplace for goods, ideas and everything else, about which you can read more here.

Robin’s work with transportation and peer production has been VRooMy from the start, and especially consistent with our work with the Ostrom Workshop on the Intention Byway in Bloomington, Indiana.

Upcoming speakers in the Salon Series (mark your calendars) are Ethan Zuckerman and Shoshana Zuboff. Both are BKC veterans and, like Robin, devoted to moving beyond status quos that vex us all. Ethan will be with us on March 7 and Shoshana on April 11. Days and times for both are Mondays at 2:00 PM Eastern. Details at those links.<

These events are all participatory, informative, challenging and fun. Please join us.

ProjectVRM at 15

This project started in September 2006, when I became a fellow at what is now the Berkman Klein Center. Our ambitions were not small.:

1. To encourage development of tools by which individuals can take control of their relationships with organizations — especially in commercial marketplaces.
2. To encourage and conduct research on VRM-related theories, usage of VRM tools, and effects as adoption of VRM tools takes place.

The photo above is of our first workshop, at Harvard Law School, in 2008. Here is another photo with a collection of topics discussed in breakout sessions:

Zoom in on any of the topics there (more are visible on the next photo in the album), and you will find many of them still on the table, thirteen years later. Had some prophet told us then that this would still be the case, we might have been discouraged. But progress has been made on all those fronts, and the main learning in the meantime is that every highly ambitious grassroots movement takes time to bear fruit.

One example is what we discussed in the “my red dot” breakout at the May 2007 Internet Identity Workshop (the 3rd of what next week will be our 33rd ) is now finally being done with the Byway, which is about to get prototyped by our nonprofit spin-off, Customer Commons, with help from the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University Bloomington, where Joyce and I are currently embedded as visiting scholars.

Our mailing list numbers 567 members, and is active, though it won’t hog your email flow. Check out the action at that link. And, if you like, join in.

You can also join in at our next gathering, VRM Day 2021b, which happens this coming Monday, 11 October.  We’ll visit our learnings thus far, and present progress and plans on many fronts, including

And we thank the BKC for its patience and faith in our project and its work.

VRM is Me2B

Most of us weren’t at the latest VRM Day or IIW (both of which happened in the week before last), so I’ll fill you in on a cool development there: a working synonym for VRM that makes a helluva lot more sense and may have a lot more box office.

That synonym is Me2B.

And by “we” I mean Lisa Lavasseur, who in addition to everything behind that link, runs the new Me2B Alliance, which features the graphic there on the right, (suggesting an individual in a driver’s seat). She is also is the Vice Chair of the  IEEE 7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms, a new effort with which some of us are also involved.

Lisa led many sessions at IIW, mostly toward solidifying what the Me2B Alliance will do. If you stay tuned to me2b.us, you can see how that work grows and evolves.

The main thing for me, in the here and now, is to share how much I like Me2B as a synonym for VRM.

It is  also a synonym for C2B, of course; but it’s more personal. I also think it may have what it takes to imply Archimedes-grade leverage for individuals in the marketplace. For more on what I mean by that, see any or all of these:

• Customertech Will Turn the Online Marketplace Into a Marvel-Like Universe in Which All of Us are Enhanced (29 May 2017 at ProjectVRM and in Medium)
• CustomerTech (15 May 2017 at ProjectVRM)
• When the customer becomes the first party (a talk given on 9 May 2017 at the European Identity and Cloud conference in Munich)
• How tools for customers have more leverage than tools for business alone (16 November 2016 in Medium)

I’m also putting this up to help me prep for mentioning Me2B tomorrow during this talk at the  2019 European Identity & Cloud Conference. It was at this same conference in 2008 that ProjectVRM won its first award. That’s it there on the right.

It’s becoming clear now that we were were way ahead of a time that finally seems to be arriving.

VRM Day: Starting Phase Two

VRM Day is today, 24 October, at the Computer History Museum. IIW follows, over the next three days at the same place. (The original version of this post was October 17.)

We’ve been doing VRM Days since (let’s see…) this one in 2013, and VRM events since this one in 2007. Coming on our tenth anniversary, this is our last in Phase One.

The difference between Phase One and Phase Two is that between rocks and snowballs. In Phase One we played Sisyphus, pushing a rock uphill. In Phase Two we roll snowballs downhill.

Phase One was about getting us to the point where VRM was accepted by many as a thing bound to happen. This has taken ten years, but we are there.

Phase Two is about making it happen, by betting our energies on ideas and work that starts rolling downhill and gaining size and momentum.

Some of that work is already rolling. Some is poised to start. Both kinds will be on the table at VRM Day. Here are ones currently on the agenda:

• VRM + CRM via JLINC. See At last: a protocol to link VRM and CRM. , and The new frontier for CRM is CDL: customer driven leads. This is a one form of intentcasting that should be enormously appealing to CRM companies and their B2B corporate customers. Speaking of which, we also have—
• Big companies welcoming VRM.  Leading this is Fing, a French think tank that brings together many of the country’s largest companies, both to welcome VRM and to research (e.g. through Mesinfos) how the future might play out. Sarah Medjek of Fing will present that work, and lead discussion of where it will head next. We will also get a chance to participate in that research by providing her with our own use cases for VRM. (We’ll take out a few minutes to each fill out an online form.)
• Terms individuals assert in dealings with companies. These are required for countless purposes. Mary Hodder will lead discussion of terms currently being developed at Customer Commons and the CISWG / Kantara User Submitted Terms working group (Consent and Information Sharing Working Group). Among other things, this leads to—
• Next steps in tracking protection and ad blocking. At the last VRM Day and IIW, we discussed CHEDDAR on the server side and #NoStalking on the individual’s side. There are now huge opportunities with both, especially if we can normalize #NoStalking terms for all tracking protection and ad blocking tools.  To prep for this, see  Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers, where you’ll find the image on the right, copied from the whiteboard on VRM Day.
• Blockchain, Identity and VRM. Read what Phil Windley has been writing lately distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) and what they bring to the identity discussions that have been happening for 22 IIWs, so far. There are many relevancies to VRM.
• Personal data. This was the main topic at two recent big events in Europe: MyData2016 in Helsinki and PIE (peronal information economy) 2016 in London.  The long-standing anchor for discussions and work on the topic at VRM Day and IIW is PDEC (Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium). Dean Landsman of PDEC will keep that conversational ball rolling. Adrian Gropper will also brief us on recent developments around personal health data as well.
• Hacks on the financial system. Kevin Cox can’t make it, but wants me to share what he would have presented. Three links: 1) a one minute video that shows why the financial system is so expensive, 2) part of a blog post respecting his local Water Authority and newly elected government., and 3) an explanation of the idea of how we can build low-cost systems of interacting agents. He adds, “Note the progression from location, to address, to identity, to money, to housing.  They are all ‘the same’.” We will also look at how small business and individuals have more in common than either do with big business. With a hint toward that, see what Xero (the very hot small business accounting software company) says here.
• What ProjectVRM becomes. We’ve been a Berkman-Klein Center project from the start. We’ve already spun off Customer Commons. Inevitably, ProjectVRM will itself be spun off, or evolve in some TBD way. We need to co-think and co-plan how that will go. It will certainly live on in the DNA of VRM and VRooMy work of many kinds. How and where it lives on organizationally is an open question we’ll need to answer.

Here is a straw man context for all of those and more.

• Top Level: Tools for people. These are ones which, in legal terms, give individuals power as first parties. In mathematical terms, they make us independent variables, rather than dependent ones. Our focus from the start has been independence and engagement.
  • VRM in the literal sense: whatever engages companies’ CRM or equivalent systems.
  • Intentcasting.
  • PIMS—Personal Information Management Systems. Goes by many names: personal clouds, personal data stores, life management platforms and so on. Ctrl-Shift has done a good job of branding PIMS, however. We should all just go with that.
  • Privacy tools. Such as those provided by tracking protection (and tracking-protective ad blocking).
  • Legal tools. Such as the terms Customer Commons and the CISWG are working on.
  • UI elements. Such as the r-button.
  • Transaction & payment systems. Such as EmanciPay.

Those overlap to some degree. For example, a PIMS app and data store can do all that stuff. But we do need to pull the concerns and categories apart as much as we can, just so we can talk about them.

Kaliya will facilitate VRM Day. She and I are still working on the agenda. Let us know what you’d like to add to the list above, and we’ll do what we can. (At IIW, you’ll do it, because it’s an unconference. That’s where all the topics are provided by participants.)

Again, register here. And see you there.

 

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We’re done with Phase One

Here’s a picture that’s worth more than a thousand words:

He’s with MAIF, the French insurance company, speaking at MyData 2016 in Helsinki, a little over a month ago. Here’s another:

That’s Sean Bohan, head of our steering committee, expanding on what many people at the conference already knew.

I was there too, giving the morning keynote on Day 2:

It was an entirely new talk. Pretty good one too, especially since  I came up with it the night before.

See, by the end of Day 1, it was clear that pretty much everybody at the conference already knew how market power was shifting from centralized industries to distributed individuals and groups (including many inside centralized industries). It was also clear that most of the hundreds of people at the conference were also familiar with VRM as a market category. I didn’t need to talk about that stuff any more. At least not in Europe, where most of the VRM action is.

So, after a very long journey, we’re finally getting started.

In my own case, the journey began when I saw the Internet coming, back in the ’80s.  It was clear to me that the Net would change the world radically, once it allowed commercial activity to flow over its pipes. That floodgate opened on April 30, 1995. Not long after that, I joined the fray as an editor for Linux Journal (where I still am, by the way, more than 20 years later). Then, in 1999, I co-wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which delivered this “one clue” above its list of 95 Theses:

And then, one decade ago last month, I started ProjectVRM, because that clue wasn’t yet true. Our reach did not exceed the grasp of marketers in the world. If anything, the Net extended marketers’ grasp a lot more than it did ours. (Shoshana Zuboff says their grasp has metastacized into surveillance capitalism. ) In respect to Gibson’s Law, Cluetrain proclaimed an arrived future that was not yet distributed. Our job was to distribute it.

Which we have. And we can start to see results such as those above. So let’s call Phase One a done thing. And start thinking about Phase Two, whatever it will be.

To get that work rolling, here are a few summary facts about ProjectVRM and related efforts.

First, the project itself could hardly be more lightweight, at least administratively. It consists of:

• A mailing list with more than 600 members
• This blog
• A wiki with a lot of stuff in it, including  concepts that are now starting to play out in different ways. In addition to VRM itself, these include intentcasting, EmanciPay and the r-button.
• Gatherings twice a year at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. These are VRM Day and the Internet Identity Workshop, or IIW. (The next ones are coming up later this month. You’re all invited.)

Second, we have a spin-off: Customer Commons, which will do for personal terms of engagement (one each of us can assert online) what Creative Commons (another Berkman-Klein spinoff) did for copyright.

Third, we have a list of many dozens of developers, which seem to be concentrated in Europe and Australia/New Zealand.  Two reasons for that, both speculative:

1. Privacy. The concept is much more highly sensitive and evolved in Europe than in the U.S. The reason we most often get goes, “Some of our governments once kept detailed records of people, and those records were used to track down and kill many of them.” There are also more evolved laws respecting privacy. In Australia there have been privacy laws for several years requiring those collecting data about individuals to make it available to them, in forms the individual specifies. And in Europe there is the General Data Protection Regulation, which will impose severe penalties for unwelcome data gathering from individuals, starting in 2018.
2. Enlightened investment. Meaning investors who want a startup to make a positive difference in the world, and not just give them a unicorn to ride out some exit. (Which seems to have become the default model in the U.S., especially Silicon Valley.)

What we lack is research. And by we I mean the world, and not just ProjectVRM.

Research is normally the first duty of a project at the Berkman Klein Center, which is chartered as a research organization. Research was ProjectVRM’s last duty, however, because we had nothing to research at first. Or, frankly, until now. That’s why we were defined as a development & research project rather than the reverse.

Where and how research on VRM and related efforts happens is a wide open question. What matters is that it needs to be done, starting soon, while the “before” state still prevails in most of the world, and the future is still on its way in delivery trucks. Who does that research matters far less than the research itself.

So we are poised at a transitional point now. Let the conversations about Phase Two commence.

 

 

 

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IoT & IoM next week at IIW

(This post was updated and given a new headline on 20 April 2016.)

In  The Compuserve of Things, Phil Windley issues this call to action:

On the Net today we face a choice between freedom and captivity, independence and dependence. How we build the Internet of Things has far-reaching consequences for the humans who will use—or be used by—it. Will we push forward, connecting things using forests of silos that are reminiscent the online services of the 1980’s, or will we learn the lessons of the Internet and build a true Internet of Things?

In other words, an Internet of Me (#IoM) and My Things. Meaning things we own that belong to us, under our control, and not puppeted by giant companies using them to snarf up data about our lives. Which is the  #IoT status quo today.

A great place to work on that is  IIW— the Internet Identity Workshop , which takes place next Tuesday-Thursday, April 26-28,  at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Phil and I co-organize it with Kaliya Hamlin.

To be discussed, among other things, is personal privacy, secured in distributed and crypto-secured sovereign personal spaces on your personal devices. Possibly using blockchains, or approaches like it.

So here is a list of some topics, code bases and approaches I’d love to see pushed forward at IIW:

• OneName is “blockchain identity.”
• Blockstack is a “decentralized DNS for blockchain applications” that “gives you fast, secure, and easy-to-use DNS, PKI, and identity management on the blockchain.” More: “When you run a Blockstack node, you join this network, which is more secure by design than traditional DNS systems and identity systems. This  is because the system’s registry and its records are secured by an underlying blockchain, which is extremely resilient against tampering and control. In the registry that makes up Blockstack, each of the names has an owner, represented by a cryptographic keypair, and is associated with instructions for how DNS resolvers and other software should resolve the name.” Here’s the academic paper explaining it.
• The Blockstack Community is “a group of blockchain companies and nonprofits coming together to define and develop a set of software protocols and tools to serve as a common backend for blockchain-powered decentralized applications.” Pull quote: “For example, a developer could use Blockstack to develop a new web architecture which uses Blockstack to host and name websites, decentralizing web publishing and circumventing the traditional DNS and web hosting systems. Similarly, an application could be developed which uses Blockstack to host media files and provide a way to tag them with attribution information so they’re easy to find and link together, creating a decentralized alternative to popular video streaming or image sharing websites. These examples help to demonstrate the powerful potential of Blockstack to fundamentally change the way modern applications are built by removing the need for a “trusted third party” to host applications, and by giving users more control.” More here.
• IPFS (short for InterPlanetary File System) is a “peer to peer hypermedia protocol” that “enables the creation of completely distributed applications.”
• OpenBazaar is “an open peer to peer marketplace.” How it works: “you download and install a program on your computer that directly connects you to other people looking to buy and sell goods and services with you.” More here and here.
• Mediachain, from Mine, has this goal: “to unbundle identity & distribution.” More here and here.
• telehash is “a lightweight interoperable protocol with strong encryption to enable mesh networking across multiple transports and platforms,” from @Jeremie Miller and other friends who gave us jabber/xmpp.
• Etherium is “a decentralized platform that runs smart contracts: applications that run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.”
• Keybase is a way to “get a public key, safely, starting just with someone’s social media username(s).”
• ____________ (your project here — tell me by mail or in the comments and I’ll add it)

In tweet-speak, that would be @BlockstackOrg, @IPFS, @OpenBazaar, @OneName, @Telehash, @Mine_Labs #Mediachain, and @IBMIVB #ADEPT

On the big company side, dig what IBM’s Institute for Business Value  is doing with “empowering the edge.” While you’re there, download Empowering the edge: Practical insights on a decentralized Internet of Things. Also go to Device Democracy: Saving the Future of the Internet of Things — and then download the paper by the same name, which includes this graphic here:

Put personal autonomy in that top triangle and you’ll have a fine model for VRM development as well. (It’s also nice to see Why we need first person technologies on the Net , published here in 2014, sourced in that same paper.)

Ideally, we would have people from all the projects above at IIW. For those not already familiar with it, IIW is a three-day unconference, meaning it’s all breakouts, with topics chosen by participants, entirely for the purpose of getting like-minded do-ers together to move their work forward. IIW has been doing that for many causes and projects since the first one, in 2005.

Register for IIW here: https://iiw22.eventbrite.com/.

Also register, if you can, for VRM Day: https://vrmday2016a.eventbrite.com/. That’s when we prep for the next three days at IIW. The main focus for this VRM Day is here.

Bonus link: David Siegel‘s Decentralization.