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March 24, 2004
Interview with Ken Jordan
Posted by Seb Paquet
On the venerable nettime mailing list, Geert Lovink interviews Ken Jordan, one of the coauthors of the ambitious Augmented Social Network white paper. Jordan and collaborators have been thinking about the issue of self-representation online for a long time, and he highlights quite clearly many of the key issues in this area.
The ASN is a blue sky vision for the future of online community. It stakes out some conceptual territory, presenting a civil society vision of how the Internet could evolve — particularly addressing the issues of Identity and Trust (two packed terms that have a pretty specific meaning in this context). It provides a clear alternative to the dangerous direction the Internet may well be heading in — a corporate/government panopticon. But it’s not enough to stand against digital disempowerment and control; we need to stand for something. The ASN shows that by coordinating the writing of standards and protocols between several different, previously separate technical areas (persistent identity, interoperability between community infrastructures, matching technologies, and brokering) you could add a layer of functionality to the Internet that would be greatly in the public interest.
Jordan enumerates shortcomings of current social networking systems such as Friendster:
- They are non-interoperable walled gardens.
- Profile info is thin, not nuanced; it isn’t context sensitive (the boss and mother problem).
- The profile information is static, not effected by your actions elsewhere.
- You have limited control over your own profile information (“It calls for a new class of services: identity brokers”; you also want a “digital bill of rights” that enables you to exert control over access.)
- The sites are exclusive, invitation-only clubs. [Note: I believe this is the exception rather than the norm].
I can’t help but notice how close weblogs come to fitting the bill - apart from restricting you to a single context and making it difficult to control acess, everything is in there. (See Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova on blogs as SNSes .)
Comments (3)
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1. Lucas on March 24, 2004 5:21 PM writes...
Good stuff, but how in the world can it be pulled off? The open source world is famously uncoordinated and private industry has had a dismal track record when it comes to infrastructure development.
There is one way, and I think one way only. What is needed is an architecture that can bootstrap itself. That is, one with a core subset of functionality that can be used to empower designers (and less crucially developers) to abstract use-cases, build consensus, and coordinate with a larger vision what are now being developed as stand-alone open-source applications.
The ingredients of this crucial subset are polling and deference-based decision making based on a form of reputation management. Polling is needed to be able to shorten the turnaround time for floating ideas and to encourage people to take a stand. Deference is needed for the formation of hierarchies. (I'm sorry, but the bazzare will have its ass kicked by the cathedral every time when it comes to large-scale, vision-based design.)
Sociologically the failing of the open-source world is that because the motivator tends to be one of peer-based respect it is largely populated by those with the Jungian type of extroverted thinking (mainly INTP's and ENTJ's). These people tend to be virtuoso programmers, but not so good at design. Companies that excel at large-scale design like Microsoft place mostly introverted thinkers into their key architectural positions (INTJ's and ENTP's).
Not to denigrate the extroverted thinker, but it is mandatory that a culture develops in the programmer-based open-source world that defers to the design of the introverted thinker. If this were to happen, (and the right set of core technologies could make it happen) it's possible we wouldn't still be clinging to broken, bare-bones technologies like RSS, like a child clinging pathetically to a popped balloon.
Permalink to Comment2. Seb on March 24, 2004 9:08 PM writes...
Lucas: I find what you wrote very intriguing. Would you mind explaining in more detail the second and third paragraphs of your comment?
Permalink to Comment3. Lucas on March 25, 2004 6:32 PM writes...
Hi Seb, the idea thanks for the kind words. :) The reason I think architectures like the ones expressed in the ASN whitepaper are bootstrappable is that the sort of interaction they enable is similar to the sort of interaction that benefits designing and developing them, that is, enhanced dialog integration and structure. That being the case, why not design a stripped-down v.0.1 exclusively with the use cases of its own creation in mind? Visionary dialog on the future shape of the internet is conspicuous in its absense right now, perhaps because the web is so currently so completely fragmented. (Someone needs to write a book called the Fragmented Web, I have a feeling it would be termed seminal by those who say such things.)
The importance I attribute to the tools of polling and deference via reputation come from my experience in design meetings. The second toughest part is to get people to loosen up and brainstorm, not worrying about looking stupid and making mistakes. The toughest part comes next and it's to encourage them let go of their pet ideas and defer to others. ("you are not your idea. let it go already.") I think these tools could help in that area, and of course with the addition of use-cases be used in v1.0.
I don't know of any open-source collaborative software specifically tuned to aid in software design out there. If there isn't any then this is indeed a conspicous absense.
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