WebMink

[DIDW] No Digital ID is an island

I'll leave the session on RFID to AKMA to document, but I will make the observation that the success of so many of the ventures at this conference depends on getting the social factors right. As I have commented before, when if comes to RFIDs and their use in e-tags, it's not the local purpose of the application that matters so much as the opportunities for triangulation.

What will make legislators worry over e-tags is not so much what each individual corporation describes as its justification (after all, tagging your kids may well seem appropriate in a high-kidnap society), but rather the uses others make of the e-tag you have created (a paedophile tracking your kid with the anti-kidnap tag you implanted may not be what you intended). In broader terms, digital ID deployers need to look beyond their own intentions when devising their solutions as the opposition may not be to their intent but rather to the harm others use it for.

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Tuesday, October 14

Agendas and registers

Danny O'Brien of NTK fame has written a readable, fascinating and important piece on 'register'. By register he means a conversational intent and tone, and I think he adds a valuable 'thinking tool' to the box. The context of what he discusses is Tim O'Reilly's 'FOO Camp' last weekend, which to the paranoid mind looked just like a Scientology convention:
"Wiki-fiddlers meet in the woods!" mails Andrew to me, delighted to find so many fish in one barrel. He cc:'s a bunch of other Brits who'll no doubt share in this mass pilloring of the fruit 'n' nut end of West Coast techtopianism.
The point Danny makes is that the reaction this event has provoked, while attributable in part to jealousy from those not invited, is an expression of the loss of a mode of conversation in the online world.
in the real world, private conversations stay private. Not because everyone is sworn to secrecy, but because their expression is ephemeral and contained to an audience. There are few secrets in private conversations; but in transmitting the information contained in the conversation, the register is subtly changed. I say to a journalist, "Look, Dave, err, frankly the guy is a bit, you know. Sheesh. He's just not the sort of person that we'd ever approve of hiring.". The journalist, filtering, prints, "Sources are said to disapprove of the appointment.".
And thus a conversation in the 'private' register is transferred to the 'public' register. Danny asserts that in normal human interaction there are three registers - 'secret', 'private' and 'public' - and that the web has not, until the introduction of weblogs, had a meaningful 'private' register. One could view weblogs as an attempt to recreate that register:
"Oh, Christ, is Xeni talking about LA art again? Why won't they all shut up? The answer why they won't shut up is - they're not talking to you. They're talking in the private register of ßlogs, that confidential style between secret-and-public. And you found them via Google. They're having a bad day. They're writing for friends who are interested in their hobbies and their life. Meanwhile, you're standing fifty yards away with a sneer, a telephoto lens and a directional microphone. Who's obsessed now?
Read the whole thing - it's Danny's usual mix of humour and insight, and I've not attempted to capture his Foo reflections.

Danny puts his finger on something I've been struggling to articulate for a while. I think there are plenty of issues that boil down to the loss of the private register on the web. Jorgen's posting on 'Standards Bashing' today provides a great example. Dave Chappell has been fixing some reporting:
One of the topics Dave mentioned was some of his latest mis-quotes in a recent article, which he discussed in his O'Reilly Developers Weblog last week. Dave's a man of the world, so he knows mis-quotes happen all the time in the press, but I believe his comments in his weblog clearly express the point that this time around things are perhaps a little too far off-side.
I'd characterise what happened to Dave as a fault (intentional or otherwise) in the modulation of comments from private to public. But it also raised in my mind how the whole area of standards can be conducted on the web. I know from my current involvement with OMA and its struggles wih 'openness' that the register of the standards context is variously in the 'secret' or the 'private' and not until the work is complete can it really be considered 'public'. The challenge is that, with no realistic concept of 'private' on the web, there is an immediate conflict between openness and privacy. I can agree with both aims.

The process of creating standards has to be accessible to all affected parties, so there's a sense in which I am critical of the way IBM and Microsoft have attempted to 'stuff' the web services technology movement with work done 'secretly'. On the other hand, I understand the need for the privacy of the parties actually conducting the work and there's a sense in which I support their actions in keeping early work off the web, which has no respect for that which is neither 'secret' nor 'public'.

Maybe these two things are actually distinct - preserving privacy and being inclusive. Perhaps my unease over web services standardisation is because Tim O'Reilly has a perfect right to decide who he invites to his personal FOO Camp but no vendor has the right to decide which competitor may or may not participate meaningfully in creating a public standard. Setting the register and setting the agenda are two different things.

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Monday, October 13

Mac OS X OpenOffice.org

While we're celebrating, I'd like to pass huge congratulations to Patrick Luby on the release of v0.7 of NeoOffice/J for Mac OS X. He has single-handedly written a highly usable front-end for the Mac OS X port of OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 (itself an enormous achievement - credit especially to Ed Peterlin and Dan Williams). This new release makes it almost feature-complete, and it will make a lot of Mac users very happy.

Patrick has avoided needing either X11 or extensive Aqua programming by using core Java technology and leveraging its existing integration into Aqua. As a porting strategy I think that's pretty smart. This release adds printing, which for me was the missing link. There's still plenty of work to be done, but it's very cool.

This program is a case-study in the power of the open source method. With neither Sun nor Apple in a position business-wise to work on a Mac version of OpenOffice.org, the fact that all the source code was freely usable allowed capable and committed developers to 'do their own thing' and meet a community need. Traditional approaches to software would have left the idea to wither - this approach, through the energy of a few software engineers, lets many flowers bloom.

[Also on java.net]

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Happy Birthday!

Wishing the OpenOffice.org project a very happy birthday - it's three years old today. I remember the excitement in Monterey at O'Reilly OSCON when it was announced and I till treasure my "Freedom" t-shirt. The code-base has come such a long way since then, to the point where people describe some of the features (like save-as-PDF) as best-of-breed.

Its reach is far greater than you'd guess from the press, where it's treated as an amusing toy. At Linux Expo last week I called for a show of hands for who was using OpenOffice.org in the (large-ish) audience and was delighted to see pretty much everyone did (in contrast to the IBM guy before me who was met with two hands when he asked how many people were using IBM software...). Talking casually to business friends I am constantly amazed how many are using OpenOffice.org or have already largely switched from other systems - especially Windows users.

And all this in only three years! Today, with around quarter-million downloads each month, with the software localised globally by capable community members, with the software being at the heart of Sun's bold new Java Desktop System, it's hard to grasp the fact that it's only been three years. How baby has grown.

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Sunday, October 12

Closer and closer...

You know stories about injustice make me mad, and this one's a cracker. It's about an American citizen whose German fiance was denied access to the US despite having a valid visa, handcuffed, imprisoned and deported. The reason? The whim of the immigration officer. He's not accountable and it seems there's no recourse - what's more, the incident will make it virtually impossible for the woman to gain access to the US in the future, regardless of the facts or their merits. As AKMA says, This Is Important, America. Beate has a first-hand account and the couple have started a 'help us' website.

I know plenty of you think I must be smoking something, but the threads of the police state in the US are drawing ever tighter. This isn't an isolated incident; there are many accounts of xenophobic heavy-handedness and they are getting closer and closer to home all the time. The amount of comment this instance gains in the US media will be a measure of the health of the nation over there - the less comment, the worse it is. And I'm not hopeful.

Update: Well, clearly some of you are smoking the same stuff. I have now had two readers contact me privately to say they have the same fears, but would prefer not to express them so openly for fear of repercussions. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

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