Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

Agency is a puffed up word used to way to say that somebody else is doing the work for you. A real estate agent, for example, sells your house for you. The paranoid worry that agents won’t manifest exactly your best interests as they do the work.

The other day I overheard somebody saying he wanted to allow users of his site, call it A, to give permission to other sites, call them B, to push and pull information from A. That ought to be common, but it is not. eBay has a scheme for doing this; but that maybe the only example I’ve seen in the wild of what ought to be a common pattern.

For example say I wanted to delegate to a B site permission to scan my email for important messages and when it finds them it should send me SMS. For example say I wanted to give permission to site hosting my blog permission to pull URLs from my private bookmarks site. For example I want to give permissions out so that my blogging and email sites can collaborate to make posting something I got in an email more trivial.

The usual, and extremely lame work around for this is for site B to ask for my user name and password at site A. Site B then visits site A pretending to be me and get’s the data it needs. That’s bogus because it grants site B far more power to act on my behalf than is desirable. This is the “Here let me help! Oh, I’ll just need to steal your identity.” approach.

Better systems aren’t hard to build. For example Site A can have a page that the user fills out to state: “I grant site B the following rights to act on my behalf for the following period.” Submitting that page results in site A coughing up a big number, in effect a ticket (technically it’s called a capability). The user gives the capability to site B.

Just a small matter of standardization?

Actually no. These such simple systems that standards, while nice, aren’t really necessary. All site A needs to do is keep a table recording the capability tokens it has handed out. When site B wants to do work as the users agent it works directly with site A. The best news is that it does not have to lie. It no longer needs to masquerade as the user. Site B authenticates with site A using it’s own account. Site A knows who it’s working with. When B wants to do some work for the user it includes with it’s request the Site A capability token it got from the user.

Site A then has to check if the requested operation is approprate; e.g. timely, within the rights the user granted, and something Site A currently trusts Site B to do. Site A can then lookup who the user is and do the deed. Site B never need know the user’s identity at Site A.

I suspect the real reason this is so uncommon is that site A doesn’t really want to relinquish data to site B; it would rather horde that data and the options for what to do with that data closely. In the dreams of site A’s product managers holding the data enables them to lock the user into a more bundled solution. Capablities help temper this concern, notice that Site A can negotiate with Site B over time to reach mutually advantagous deals.

Small sites should do two things. They ought to enable this kind of agency because it will create complements around their offering; while complements always make your offering more valuable they also let small sites collaborate to create integrated experiances that currently only huge portals can. The second thing they should do is just as important though. They should be prepared to limit partner site access in scenarios where it becomes clear that they are taking more than they are giving back. I.e. some sort of peering agreement would be a good thing.

If small service sites can enable this kind of activity highly cool highly integrated services will emerge quickly, much more quickly than the product manager at any tightly integrated centralized site can manage to implement them.

Fear of agency v.s. fear of concentration - damn’d if you do damn’d if you don’t.

(thanks to the three people who noted typos so far)

Our motto: “Fund ‘em all and let the Invisible Hand sort them out.”

I very much liked this list of design traps. It’s taken from the middle of a paper (pdf) by the always brilliant Phil Agre. In that context Phil is talking about the problem of designing a technology rich system that will presumably transform an existing large social institution, libraries. But it’s a really good list for all those situations where your designing a system that is expected to transform behaviors in an existing institution.

The trap of …

• … presupposing standards
• … deriving political consequences
• … automation
• … assuming rapid change
• … command and control computing
• … inventing a new world
• … blaming resistance
• … assuming away intermediaries
• … technology
• … designing for a limited range of cases
• … presupposing transparency

I want to chew on these a bit, so hopefully this posting will get revised over time. These are my restatement of what Phil writes, which is of course much better.

Standards: Never presume things are interoperable. Standards are hard work and only rarely emerge. Let’s repeat that, they rarely emerge. Most systems are heterogenous aggregations with much, if not most, of their substance in the glop that inter-connects their parts.

Politics: Never assume your technology leads to your desired political outcomes. This one’s facinating because consensus that the work at hand is creating a social good is always a constructive driver of large change. It maybe a near certainty that one will get piled on. But! Systems design is a thicket of unintended consequences. This one’s very entangled with the standards, hierarchy and intermediary traps.

Automation: Designs reshape roles, they don’t meerly automate existing chores. At first blush you may look at your system as lifting a burden off some actor in the old system; but it is useful to realize that in fact you are negotiating the nature of the work. This is often why system designers tend to automate other people’s work, not their own. This kind of negotation is politics; not in the big idea sense but the complex local politics of successfully integrating diverse points of view and need.

Rate of Change: Chips, communications, and network effects can grow amazingly fast; meanwhile social, physical, and economic systems are be very resilient, durible, and slow to change. System design takes place in the huge space between. Any assumption you make about real rate of change should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Note the irony in the standards trap mentioned earlier: assuming standards, and hence interoprablity, is the presumption that there is a stable durible social foundation you can build on.

Hierarchy: Phil’s argument here is that historically computer systems drew most of their funding from hierarchtical organizations both commercial and milatary and that has created a bias in our tool kits and mind sets. True. But that’s not the only reason why edge emphasising design patterns are so scarce.

… more later

Phil’s paragraphs on these are at the tail end of section two of the paper (pdf).

I filled up the car yesterday for $2.19 a gallon. That’s not the typical price here in the Boston area, getting that price requires a detour over to the low price gas zone nearer the gasoline terminal. But it is weird. That’s less than we were paying Rita and Katrina laying waste to US oil and refinery capacity in the Gulf region; and that source of supply hasn’t come back on line.

Why is it so low? I think it’s because both the international regulators and the market over reacted and we are now bathing in petrol sent over by from Europe.

Heat is on at my house. Wholesale natural gas hasn’t rebounded like petrol has. It’s still going for about twice last years prices and some people think we might see a shortage this year. In New England a big slice of our electric power is produced from natural gas. The state has relaxed some environmental protection rules so some older oil based electric plants might be able take a bit of the pressure off the natural gas supply.

But the key fact I draw out of all this is that petrol is a lot more fungible in world markets compared to natural gas. And in the near term US is on it’s own when it comes to natural gas. LNG supply isn’t going to fill the gap - the supply isn’t there and the terminals to accept the supply are don’t exist.

Here’s a bizarre thought. What happens when people to realize that the cheapest most abundant source of fuel this winter is petrol? Most people have no idea how dangerous petrol is.

There are snow flakes outside my window at this very moment.

The Fitzgerald press conference was just marvelous, the kind of political theater that you’d pay to see on the stage. Just amazing. (transcript).

I found the most revealing bit to be this analogy:

Let me try something.

If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you’d want to know why the pitcher did that. And you’d wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, I’ve got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I’m just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.

You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter’s head. And there’s lots of shades of gray in between.

You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.

And what you’d want to do is have as much information as you could. You’d want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you’d want to know.

And then you’d make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it.

In this case, it’s a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn’t to one person. It wasn’t just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.

And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?

Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?

And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.

Meanwhile in other news. Washington Post shows some balls: Vice President for Torture, and the Secretary for the Environment channel’s Orwell arguing we should open the Arctic Refugee to drilling because administration’s friends would then have someplace to spend the 10 billion in profits they captured last quarter.