Condensed/Repeat Sovereignty Principles + Practice = Opportunity
Condensed/Repeat Sovereignty Principles + Practice = Opportunity
Thursday 20J
Convener: Dave Huseby
Notes-taker(s): NH
Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:
Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:
DH trying to condense 3 talks, responding to challenges ‘If you were in charge of the Internet how would your values change the way the Internet works?’
User Sovereignty is a spectrum not an absolute ‘a user controls what, when, where and how of an interaction’. e.g. FB @ one end, Sam Smith at the other, understand that any service fits somewhere on the spectrum
Let’s re-define decentralisation, as distinct from distributed (e.g. twitter), but because of little user sovereignty, they are not properly distributed
Presents 6 principles of user sovereignty which describe the absolute extreme of user sovereignty on the spectrum
- Absolute privacy by default
- Absolute correlation/zero correlation by default
- What, not who (ie no identification and go straight to authorization)
- Open and standard protocols / formats
- Strong encryption
- Balance of power
From principle to practice
- Users control the who, what, when, where, and how of their interaction
- User access is fully anonymous & private
- Users fully control their level of correlation
- Users only use open protocols
- ….
- ….
Nine problems: Discovery, Introduction, Coherence, Public Services, Trust, Privacy, Coordination, Membership, Persistent State
Bold - have decentralised solutions in the main
Italics - researching solutions (get slide)
Normal text - publically available & solved
Showed research on Coherence (network analytics)
User Sovereignty means better UX
- Spotting Economic Opportunity - IIW full of entrepreneurs!
Choice for companies to build distributed services at the edge vs walled gardens which threaten user autonomy
Example of Git - failed to solve some of the 9 problems.
- e.g. not coherent (doesn’t accommodate asynchronous connections)
- No easy way to connect with other users (Introduction)
- Git’s competitor Fossil, has solved the Membership
- Github.com is the solution to the 9 problems - opportunity because of lack of decentralization of Git.
Bitcoin is not truly decentralized
- lacks discovery & coherence
- privacy partly addressed by Coinjoin
- solution is coinbase.com to fill these gaps
Critique of other systems - the web analysed against 9 problems = economic opportunity in the order of billions of $
Discussion re blogging protocols, impact of google who hated the decentralization (Doc) and killed blogging
Dave hopes that people will use the 9 problems to analyse services because there’s gold in the holes - great economic opportunity
He’s been harsh on the browser and we should redesign because it’s an attack vector
Apps are over-taking browsers so shifting focus away from web stack so looking to other protocols
5am project
fully user sovereign, decentralized github
Link to slide deck, provided by Dave Huseby:
http://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G4Quf96ZIts2KgOc9w8WFUpTuF5Bkgbun90jU0m9F2M/edit?usp=sharing
