Category Archives: group membranes

Internet Identity & the Public Notary

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Solving coordination problems, in this case the internet identity problem, always involves leveraging some existing coordination framework. For example the PGP signing scheme leverages the acquaintance network and the signers are encouraged to leverage the government issued identity cards. For example my local library asks to see a utility bill, and thus leverages the account relationship I have with the utility.

When your designing one of these internet identity schemes you thrash around looking for something you might tie your raft to. The IP address, the browser cookie, the confirmed email address, etc. There are lots of clever schemes. For example Paypal does, or at least used to, do a cute trick where they would confirm that you had access to a bank account by making some tiny random deposits and then asking you to confirm their amounts. These days it’s common to see SMS messaging used to confirm you have control, at least for a moment or two, of a particular mobile phone number. I haven’t personally experianced, but I presume somebody has built, the phone equivalent of confirming an email address.

As usual these examples have three parties: entity to be identified, entity that desires that, and some third party: i.e. the user, the service, and the identity provider. When you confirm an email address the identity provider is the email infrastructure; and the reason the service finds that useful is it trusts that infrastructure; at a least somewhat. When a service confirm a mobile phone number using a SMS the SMS infrastructure is filling the role of identity provider. When a bar-keep checks a driver’s license he’s trusting that infrastructure; and his ability detect fraud.

The driver’s license is what in the digital world we might call a capability; it’s a token that grant’s it’s holder the right to perform various activities. Including, surprisingly and ironically, the ability to order a beer. We can make quite robust capability tokens in the digital world; but we need to have somebody sign them.

In the off-line world we have institutional infrastructure to support such signing. Quite a few actually. Financial industry, for example, has something they call a bank signature and if you take a random piece of paper down to a bank where you have an account the branch bank officer will be happy to watch you sign it, then they they will first press a large 3 dimensional stamp into the paper and then over that they will sign the paper too. Notary publics perform analogous services.

So. Let’s say I want to organize a large group of volunteers to provide some service for the general public. Let’s imagine that as part of this service the volunteers will be sending email to members of the general public with whom they have zero existing relationship; so the volunteers are concerned that they will be accused of spamming; or worse might get used due to a security flaw to actually spam.

I think the volunteers’ concerns could be addressed if I could give them a signed note from the user that grants them permission to pass on the email associated with the service. I.e. a capability token. But who would sign it?

I don’t think I’ve previously seen the idea of mimicking the notary public architecture before. It is just what’s needed. The service community selects some number of their members and anoints them as notable. Any notable person may gin up capablity tokens for a user. Any user wishing to use the service must seek out a notable person, acquire a signed capability token. The user can then distribute that token as they see fit.

The volunteers in a service community would want the notables governed well. That means at least: they are easy to find, cheap to use, courteous and professional in their manner, etc. Much that’s wrong with the existing key signing schemes arises from breakdowns (aka rent seeking) at this level.

But today I’m thinking that the real breakdown in those schemes was the choice to follow commercial models for the governance of the notables; rather than professional or fraternal models. I.e. non-profit. Or possible we should leverage state licensed models. Aside: there are millions of notary publics in the US.
I’m particularly enjoying the idea of a fraternal orders of signers in the tradition of Friendly Societies like the Odd Fellows, or Service Clubs like the International Order of Twelve Knights and Daughters of Tabor. Who wouldn’t want to be IKK, BJ, GS; aka an Imperial Knight of the Key, Boston Jurisdiction, GPG Affiliate. It would certainly come with a funny hat and a lapel pin.

Precarious Values

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One of life’s puzzles is how to elicit desired behaviors. Managers, parents, leaders, what have you try out various schemes to address this puzzle. I sometimes characterise this as thrashing about looking for the right lever to pull. It’s not uncommon to see people deeply committed to a particular lever; metric management for example. The social sciences are replete with grand frameworks that outline a logic for this or that lever.

Somebody (thanks Chris) passed along this fun paper: “Organizational Adaption and Precarious Values: A Case Study” that frames up the problem in a nice way. “Precarious Values,” which I suspect was introduced (1956) here, is a lovely name for all the values which garner lip service but fail to attract supporting behaviors. That’s key. Members of this class are not in dispute, people agree that they are important and that they ought to acted upon; but they don’t actually get acted upon. They are precarious because it’s widely known that values that fail to be acted upon grow progressively weaker until they are extinguished entirely.

That something can be valued but then fail to garner it’s supporting behaviours is a delightful way of thinking about values. The puzzle of eliciting desired behaviors is situated right in the intersection between values and behaviors. Curiously it runs the other way; behaviors are quite skilled at attracting a portfolio of values to justify them. That’s a complementary problem, how do you bridge behaviors into well justified value?

So we have two problems. How are behavior’s elicited? How are values justified?

Not surprisingly I see the range of behaviors as being drawn from a highly skewed distribution and I’m mostly interested in the behaviors of groups. The value are, presumably, the stories the group tells about why it has adopted particular patterns of behavior. For example in open source communities we often tell the itch-scratch story and the many-eyes story to create a rational frame in support of common behaviors.  It’s notable that both those behaviors arose in advance of the values that latter explained them.

The precarious values are those with strong narratives, but which when mapped into the highly skewed distribution of behaviors are found in the lower middle-class. They get some attention but it appears that they don’t get attention in proportion to their supporting stories.

In open source such things might include obviously valuable activities such as testing, documentation, critical code reading, planning, design, accessibility, introductory examples, …    It’s a very long list, much longer than that, but then the lower-middle class is not a small population in any system.
Since behaviors are scarce there is competition between the values for supporting behaviors. There are patterns to that competition. The population of values is all struggling to negotiate out what behaviors will be elicited. Advocates for a particular set of behaviors are wise to seek allies. It’s a mistake to be too zealous in advocacy for one particular precarious value. Zealotry is not negotiation and it threatens all the other values. The other values maybe in competition but they can agree to band together to shun a particularly disruptive value in their community. Tempering the voice of a given value is difficult advice to take. A precarious value has – almost by definition – is broad consensus that it is valuable as it’s principle resource. Having voice but not action is an excellent climate for a storm of zealotry.

The case study in the paper is about adult education. The value that was made precarious, even to the point of extinction, was professionalism in the teaching staff. The story told is about how the state of California set out to provide a rich supply of continuing education. First to help emigrants to integrate with the large society more smoothly, but then to help assure that the citizens were better prepared to deal with the rapid rates of change in modern society (a problem that the economists sometimes describe as the need for high labor flexibility).

Structurally though adult education is a totally different beast from formal schooling. Adults are free, which youths are not. When the weather turns nice the adults tended not to show up. When running their finger down the catalog of course the adults tended to select course with more immediate pleasures (folk dancing, yoga) v.s. courses of a more professional nature (word processing, sales management). Meanwhile the instructors in youth oriented programs tended to be highly certified and thus well trained; while for many many reasons the instructors in the adult programs rarely were.

What’s fascinating about the story is that the precarious values in question (i.e. those of professional educators) were displaced. When the educational establishment advocated the creation of a large program for adult education they didn’t see it coming; but once the program had matured their professional values became first precarious and then finally entirely displaced.

Displacement is a natural fear for any given precarious value, but it isn’t the inevitable outcome. A precarious value can live on for years; since it has broad support. In open source, for example, both planning and documentation live on as precarious values. Both tend to elicit sufficient behaviors to keep them alive.

Recognizing that there is a struggle between values being played out in any community was quite enlightening but there is something more fundamentally interesting. It looks to me like the stories communities tell about their strong values are monuments to past struggles upon this plane. For example the itch-scratch story is almost a shrine we in the open source community visit to remember those days, now past, when the idea of letting some random user tinker with the code in an apparently whimsical manner was it’s self a precarious value.

Holidays

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I once did a consulting gig for a huge bank and learned that thier international funds transfer network would grind to a crawl each May Day.  All over the world workers would take a day off and capitalism would grind to a halt.

If you work in middle management in any large firm you learn to despise one particular task, organizing a meeting.  Coordinating a diverse group of people to all show up at the same time and place; the more diverse the group the harder it is.

A powerful charismatic actor in a distant part of my organization recently organized a gathering in the early evening.  The attendees all showed up.  It was a wily move, putting our loyalty to the workplace in competition with our loyalty to what ever social network we page in just after the workday ends.  He sweetened the deal with food.

So I have this theory, “which is mine,” that one of the functions of holidays is to create interruptions in the usual dance of social network coordination.  They are society device to relieve the stress that builds up if these secondary social networks don’t get some attention.  This theory leads to a natural question: “what secondary social networks did you nurture during the last break?”

The scarcity of these breaks leads to competition.  Around my house we started joking this last holiday season.  “You know, that the Christians stole this holiday from the pagans.    Right?”  “Oh yeah! …  But then, the Pagans stole it from the Neanderthals.” Of course the the commies stole May Day from the Pagans too.
Modern life makes the war on holidays all that more interesting, since modern life is al about juggling numerous social networks.
We don’t do May day in the US.  The tension between capital and labor played out in different ways.  We do have a holiday assigned to labor, but it’s in September.  I don’t think I’ve heard, even once, somebody complain about how we have lost touch with the true meaning of Labor Day.  Putting our Labor Day on the opposite end of the annual calendar from May Day was presumably a scheme to avoid the US labor movement coordinating it’s activities with thier international brethern.

If your goal is to engineer a social network you spend a lot of your time attempting to orchestrate these points of rendezvous.  In or out of existence depending on your goals.    Eid ul-Fitr is an example of a holiday that is close to, but doesn’t quite, land on the exact same day worldwide.  I’ve read rants from people who feel it ought to.  There was a long standing yearning in my household that, if only, we could all agree to exchange presents a week after Christmas morning, think of the money we could save!
Sometimes you find competing holidays running up right against each other.  Halloween next to All Saint’s day is a classic example.  My favorite it Queen’s day in Holland, right next to May day.

DAIC DAIC give me your answer please

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DAIC, which sounds like Daisy, is one of those BSchool/Psychology-Today frameworks I picked up at some point in my work life. It’s mnemonic for four roles that employee’s might play in the process of reaching a decision:

  • Driver
  • Approver
  • Informed
  • Consultant

Since entrepreneurs ran the organization inside of which I learned this particular framework they most loved the role of Driver; but in different organizations you tend more affection for one or another role. I have, for example, worked in organizations where the consulting and informed roles were dominate. Some groups do a fine job without one or another role. Some groups manage to get into a dysfunctional modality where two roles are in opposition and the others are ignored.

This model is pretty good, as these thing go. It gets better if you start to dig into the complexity of performing any one of these roles. That’s easier to think about if you add in a fifth entity; i.e. the decision being made.  Make it concrete: a proposal, a mailing list, a meeting, a plan, etc.  The players then rendezvous around that. That is pretty standard advice in the negotiation literature; e.g. that multiparty negotiations can only work if you rendezvous around a single text.

Once that rendezvous point, that single-text, is introduced then you can begin to see some very constructive things about how the role of each of the four kinds above should play out.

  • Driver: keep the text moving, enable others to succeed at their role.
  • Approver: own/disown, sign, accept, embrace, reject, comprehend, send back the text.
  • Informed: comprehend, monitor, and as necessary demand access to the text
  • Consultant: add value, critique, collaborate, network

Any of these parties can cause the process to fail by intent, neglect, or (more typcially) by misunderstanding their role. Any of these players can become quite powerful by if they play their role with skill.  Any one of these can be the dominate one in shaping the resulting decision.

By way of example; those in the informed role often presume they lack power to shape the outcome and think they have only the power to obstruct; and certainly that is one of the powers inherent in that role.  But you can do a lot of shaping by asking the right questions and assuring that your actually informed – that process can cause huge course corrections.

open voice networks

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Martian speaks wisely about why open voice networks aren’t a technology problem but a social entrepenural one.  At the same time he is also talking about a minor aspect of why internet identity isn’t a technology problem.

These days I find myself thinking that internet identity is hard because the gap between people’s intuitions and the technology substrate is so vast.  In the real world privacy tends to be the default; in the virtual world it’s the other way around.  Saying we lack a substrate for creating privacy in the net is the worst kind of understatement; it’s a bit like saying I lack x-ray vision.

As he says we lack good understanding of what makes an open v.s. closed network.  Capitalists care about that, since closed networks have the potential to generate great wealth.  I care because there is a huge swath of tiny groups that can’t get the benefits of adding a virtual aspect to their existence.  For example the 3rd grade parents can’t put their contact list on line.  Which is killing these groups and that’s very bad for the social network’s health.

Groups, id cards & hub failure

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Thought provoking: my morning mail reports that the ID card servers at the university are down and that this effects “card readers” across campus.  Reminds one that hubs are a target for assorted criminal activity.  I wonder what boundry crossings people are discovering they can’t make right now?

Meanwhile I’m told we citizens get our new regional transportation passes at the end of the month so that getting on the bus and subway will involve bringing the card into physical proximity of the toll collecting gates.  RFID I presume.  So this morning I wonder if that system has a central point of failure?

When you work on standards it’s always interesting how one constituency has concerns that another constituency has to struggle to appreciate.  That’s the real work.  In the early days of the Liberty Alliance one of these was how extremely reluctant, to the point that it had the potential to be a deal breaker, the web site builders were to add anything that might effect their reliability.  That’s a severe barrier to adoption for any identity provider.  It is very difficult for an identity provider to guarantee that the system administrator’s bonus will never be adversely effected.

If I can’t get into the pool today who will compensate me?

Ruling the Commons

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I read this marvelous book, Privatopia, about Common Interest Developments, or CIDs, some time back. CIDs go by various names, condo associations, gated communities, etc. They are a form of government that lie in the vast gray zone between real government and purely private ownership; i.e. where the club goods hang out. One of the stories he tells is how there are a handful of constituencies at the table: developers, community managers, owners, service providers (lawyers, landscapers, agents), local governments, etc. That as time has passed the community managers have come to dominate the governance of the communities. They are little kings, and what they care most about is keeping a lid on things. I was reminded of that story when reading this newspaper article about:

DENVER, Colorado (AP) — A homeowners’ association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan…

…Bob Kearns, president of the Loma Linda Homeowners Association

… Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything.

Kearns fired all five committee members.

Kearns has since backed down, but the point stands… little kings.

Oh look! The author of that book has a blog.

Darwin and Platform Tyranny

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“Tyranny consists of the desire of universal power beyond its scope.”

One of the nice things about having a blog is that you can spit out those damn brainstorms before they do too much damage to your equilibrium or worse or are extinguished by your daily life.

I’d not noted before that the evolved animal is like a software platform.

One of the curious facts about software platforms is that they aren’t good for anything. You have to pile an application on to the platform before it solves real problem. That is a useful right first approximation. Of course platforms are good for something, they are good for solving some space of problems. They allow you to build things.

There is a gap between a platform and a problem solution. In platform system design, where we don’t solve problems we just design more platforms, we think of these as layers.

For example the end-to-end principle suggests that the layers should be thin, so that the lower layers are windowed down to a kernel of necessary function and no more. In business theory where platforms go by other names like toolkits, standards, rule sets, and are observed in numerous guises such as major commodities on supply chain, we know that a platform creates an options space of further commercial activity. There is always a lot of competitive to and fro about who gets to capture that value. Suppliers often covet value created down stream from them in the supply chain. That’s no different than how platform vendors often fold high value innovations back into their platform offering. A move that is contrary to the end-to-end principle but is quite rational in a commercial mindset. When we complain about a supplier, say Microsoft, overreaching, say by bundling the web browser with the operating system, we call that monopoly; but as the quote above suggests it’s a kind of tyranny.

Reading and thinking about “Breakdown of Will” has been triggering some very surprising connections to all that. Animals are wired to manage their attention in a way that is at odds what we believe to be the optimal way to manage the attention of a rational man. There is a gap between the platform, i.e. the animal, and the problem to be solved, i.e. to be a rational man. It is into this gap that we humans pour our clever rationalizing schemes. Applications on the platform.

So that was my brainstorm. What triggered it was some stuff at the beginning of a book from the anthropology library about trying to explain religion. The introduction was working it’s way through the necessary dross and was talking about Darwinian explanations for religion. My reaction was “The platform can only tell you so much about the applications that run on it.” Darwinian ideas are a major supplier in the explaination of animal systems, but there is a tendency for people to let these ideas overreach their natural scope. You see a similar overreaching by the ideas that come of economics. At this point in my thinking about the ideas in “Breakdown of Will” I’m more inclined to put religion in the application layer as part of our struggle to create useful solutions atop the worse is better legacy platform.

Collabrative Circles

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I read Collaborative Circles : Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work a month or two ago and I’ve wanted to write up my thoughts since then. Clearly that’s not coming together. So let me highly recommend it, and dribble out a few thoughts.

It’s a very rare book about how groups form, what their dynamics are, the stages they move through, what roles emerge during those various stages. The groups he writes about are creative groups, artistic movements mostly. The participants are typically young and the output of the groups are tend to be significant.

The author has an overarching model with a nice narrative arc.

  • The groups form.
  • Settle in on a problem, as they do so they rebel against the existing order.
  • They go through a quest to create a new way of dealing with that problem and this is when the group is the most creative.
  • Having found a possible solution to the problem they enter into a phase of collective action.
  • Later the groups tend to dissipate and their members follow their own paths.
  • And then finally, in a epilogue, they often come together for a reunion.

It’s not hard to make fun of this model since once you strip it down to it’s raw form there’s almost nothing there: get together for beers, rant about problem, plan solution, execute plan, move on. But making fun of the framework isn’t as much fun as decorating the framework with more details.

For example there are some very nice descriptions of various roles that emerge as the groups evolve.

  • Gatekeepers are the connectors who drawn people into the groups who will fit and add value.
  • Corks are members who go with flow adding value by condensing and reinforcing the ideas.
  • Scapegoats are peripheral members used as exemplars of behaviors what the core group is attempting to move away from.
  • Peacemakers are members who labor to temper the stress that emerges as groups fight out the details of collective action or ideas.
  • Lightning rods are members who take latent consensus, pull it out of the air and verbalize it.
  • Collaborative pairs, he argues, are a key creative engine in these groups.
  • Executive managers are the members that emerge as the group attempts to execute their solution, they are a means to solving the coordination problems that arise at that stage.

That list is an example of why this book is so useful. It provides vocabulary, stories, and a framework for thinking about group dynamics. Real groups remake themselves continuously, moving through all the stages simultaneously. It is healthy for a group to be moving at least some on all these fronts at once.

It’s a great book. Let me thank Clay Shirky for recommending it.