Fuse: Connecting Your Car to the Rest of Your Life

I just backed my friend Phil Windley’s new Kickstarter project, Fuse. Everyone with a car should go back it now. Everyone who cares about data privacy should also go back it.

Every car has an on-board computer with tons of data: your mileage, your average speed, even your tire pressure. When you take your car into the shop, mechanics plug into this computer to access that data so that they can diagnose your car.

I’ve been wanting to access that data myself forever, and it’s not just because I’m a data geek. As someone who travels a lot for business, I track my mileage. Not only is it a royal pain to do manually, it just seems wrong, given that your car already has this data. But until recently, I had no ability to access it.

Fuse unlocks that data, and gives you access. It consists of a device that you plug into your car’s diagnostic outlet and a mobile app that gives you access to that data.

That alone should make you want this. But I’m going out of my way to blog about this project because of what Fuse does under the hood.

The problem with most of the emerging apps in this space is that they essentially trade convenience and coolness for ownership of your data. Most of us don’t pay attention to that. We’re too pre-occupied by the coolness. Some of us feel vaguely uneasy about the trade-off, but we do it anyway. Coolness is a powerful motivator.

Phil has been a leader in the digital identity space for a very long time. He literally wrote the book on it. He’s part of a community of folks who thinks that you — the individual — should own and control your data. Enabling this is a hard technical problem, but it’s an even knottier social problem.

Fuse is built on top of a trust and privacy framework that my friends, Drummond Reed and Andy Dale, have helped evolved. Fuse is cool, compelling, and socially responsible. These are the kinds of apps that will help create the kind of world that I want to live in.

If you’d like to read more about these nitty gritty aspects of Fuse, go check out Phil’s blog. If you’d like to read more about the bigger vision behind technology like this, start with Vendor Relationship Management (VRM).

Don’t forget to back the project!

barx: A Ruby XRI Resolver

Last month, Victor Grey and Kermit Snelson announced barx, the first full implementation of the XRI 2.0 draft specification (working draft 11, for those of you keeping track). I finally downloaded and started playing with it tonight; it’s very nice. Most OpenID implementations are using a proxy hack to support i-names, but as real XRI implementations start to come out, we’ll start seeing many more interesting applications.    (MS5)

I’ve started to port barx over to Perl and will hopefully have it completed by IIW next week. Yes, I’m coding again. I’ve been sitting on a slew of year-old ideas that need to get implemented, and I’m tired of being a preacher instead of a do-er (at least when it comes to code). It’s against my instincts, and I don’t have enough of an audience to leverage the Lazy Web.    (MS6)

Besides, I was starting to miss it. Over the last few years, I’ve built a reputation as someone who knows a bit about collaboration, not just about tools, and that’s been really gratifying. It’s also helped me feel okay about reminding people that I still know a bit about tools as well. Plus, a lot of things have been stoking the fire recently. I was managing the HyperScope project last year and the Grantsfire project this year, both of which are conceptually and technically interesting. I never stopped reading code, and a lot of my friends are developers. What really kicked things into gear for me, though, was stepping in as an emergency developer for Grantsfire and watching Linus Torvalds‘s git talk.    (MS7)

I started playing with a bunch of ideas at once, but I’m focusing on Grantsfire and the Digital Identity stuff now. Stay tuned, and if you want to hack with me over the next few weeks, either face-to-face or remotely, ping me.    (MS8)

Online Tools As Space

It’s late, I’m tired, and I have a workshop I’m hosting tomorrow. But, I’ve got to get this off my chest now. You can thank my old partner in crime, Chris Dent, for initially instigating this with his blog post entitled, People in Social Software Systems.” What closed the deal for me was reading Wendy Seltzer‘s piece, “Facebook: Privacy versus cross-context aggregation.”    (MOZ)

I’ve been playing with this metaphor of Online Tools As Space for about a year now, and I’ve been threatening to write an essay on it for about as long. The premise is simple. We have a natural intuition for space and how it affects the way we work. Whether or not we leverage that intuition is another problem entirely, but the fact of the matter is, we do a better job of leveraging that intuition in meatspace than we do in online space. And we can leverage that intuition in online space.    (MP0)

Online space is mostly equivalent to physical space, except the physics are slightly different. The folks at Linden Lab have this saying about Second Life: “It’s just like real life, except you can fly.” That’s not quite what I mean when I say the physics of online space is different, and the statement itself is wrong in subtle, but important ways. (Yeah, yeah, I understand it’s a marketing slogan.)    (MP1)

Time is essentially equivalent in both online and physical space. What’s different are the notions of proximity and presence. There is still the notion of distance in online space, but it’s fungible. I can bridge gaps by modifying the presentation layer or by linking content, and suddenly, distances disappear. Moreover, we can take an existing online space and munge into something that looks entirely different. Since we don’t have the notion of physical presence, we have to create a digital representation — essentially Digital Identity.    (MP2)

What are the ramifications of all of this? First the good news. Once we get past the mental roadblock that technology seems to create in all of us, we can find that — for the most part — our intuitions about space applies both to physical and online spaces. I can identify a good intimate or public space just by looking at it, whether it’s a physical room or a web site. We just have to leverage this intuition.    (MP3)

Now the bad news. The fungibility of online space and Digital Identity creates social havoc, largely in the area of privacy. People’s blogs feel like private spaces, and so people treat them as such, but they’re not actually private. People make contributions to Wikipedia, not expecting these to reveal much about their identities, yet some researchers discover that if you aggregate all this data, you can create visualizations that reveal a startling amount about a person’s identity. And all of this stuff is easy to do.    (MP4)

I’ve got a lot more to say on all of this, and perhaps one day, I’ll be able to say it coherently. But now that I’ve gotten it off my chest, I’d love to hear people’s feedback.    (MP5)

The Puzzle Puzzle

A few years ago, Mike Ozburn and I were talking about how to catalyze the Digital Identity community. Mike offered a fantastic analogy, which I’ve since extended and retold repeatedly.    (MO0)

Suppose you have a thousand people. Their job? Solve a puzzle with a million pieces. What’s the best way to proceed with this challenge?    (MO1)

The solution is simple. Show them what the completed puzzle looks like. If they know where to go, they’ll figure the rest out themselves.    (MO2)

Voting, Collective Leadership, and Identity Commons

Thanks to next week’s Creating Space, Collective Leadership has been on my mind a lot recently. It’s also been a key element of the new Identity Commons. One of the issues we’ve been grappling with is decision-making. To understand why this is a challenge, you have to understand the underlying structure and philosophy of the organization.    (M5R)

Ultimately, Identity Commons is a Community Mark that represents a set of values concerning Digital Identity. It’s a name bestowed on the community of folks who care about User-Centric Identity. If you care about this stuff, then you are part of Identity Commons. There is nothing to join, and you are free to use the name and logo as a way of demonstrating your support of these values.    (M5S)

Why this is such a powerful and important construct is a topic for another day. What’s interesting about this particular community is that there’s also a corresponding legal structure, a nonprofit organization that is in the process of being incorporated. This organization consists of community “Stewards” — people appointed by the community to represent the interests of particular sub-communities (“Working Groups”) and who are responsible for managing the tangible assets of the commons. There are rules for becoming Working Groups and Stewards, but they are extremely lightweight.    (M5T)

All of the Stewards comprise a Stewards Council. Each Steward has an equal vote on all matters. There is a Chair, but that position is mostly facilitative. There is also a Chief Catalyst, someone (not necessarily a Steward) who is responsible for handling the operational duties of the organization and catalyzing action in the community.    (M5U)

It’s a fascinating, but delicate structure. The Stewards Council has an important leadership responsibility, but that role is distributed equally among all of the Stewards. How do Stewards exercise leadership effectively given this structure? Decision-making via voting is clumsy in many contexts, and yet that’s the only process that we’ve actually defined.    (M5V)

We’ve had a number of interesting conversations on the topic, and the latest discussion recently surfaced a lurker, Martien Van Steenbergen, who cited an interesting reference on holacracy. Martien quotes the following excerpt (emphasis his):    (M5W)

Another common question is about the “possible votes” in integrative decision making. At first it can sound like there are two possible votes on a proposed decision — “consent” or “object” — though that’s missing a key point. Consent isn’t about “votes” at all; the idea of a vote doesn’t make sense in the context of consent. There are no votes, and people do not vote.    (M5X)

People do say whether they know of a reason why the proposed decision is outside the limits of tolerance of any aspect of the system, and then decision making continues to integrate that new information. This isn’t the same as most consensus-based processes — either in theory or in practice — although it does sound similar at first, especially before an actual meeting that seeks consent is witnessed.    (M5Y)

This quote is keying on the difference between Collective Leadership and consensus leadership. They are not the same thing. With Collective Leadership, you are acknowledging the multi-faceted requirements of leadership, and you are empowering those best suited to meet those requirements to fulfill that leadership role. You are not voting on every decision, which would be a sure path to disaster.    (M5Z)

One of the ways this manifests itself is by making decisions “without objection.” This is a technique from Roberts Rules Of Order that Joaquin Miller brought to our attention. Essentially, you empower people to act, unless someone in the group objects, at which point an alternative process kicks in. Everyone still has a voice in the decisions, but it is a proactive rather than a reactive style, and it encourages action rather than stagnation.    (M60)

I believe that when you have great collaborative process, voting is a rubber stamping process, even when the topic is controversial. In other words, the actual decision-making process starts well before any vote happens. Healthy deliberation results in Shared Understanding, which in turn helps to surface clear courses of action that navigate through the obstacles of contradictory ideologies. When there is pressure for movement (another pattern of high-performance collaboration), then people will rally around those courses of action.    (M61)