DeseretCoin and altcoin decentralization +/- centralization

When I learned about DACs, it opened my mind to some of the possibilities for this technology applied to rewards and organization/management approaches.  Then a few weeks ago at the Utah Bitcoin Meetup someone introduced DeseretCoin where the coin would be for local Utah businesses, so they would be distributed by some trusted local person (non-governmental, thankfully).  This just brought to light in my mind how any aspect of an altcoin network can be centralized by their creator.

So many possibilities!

RootsTech Presentation: Collaborating with Mom via P2P

Well, my presentation is done.  I'm happy to say that I finished enough of my tools to show off the essential parts:

• A tool where users can watch their shared file-system folders for changes from others
• ... which (diffs) can be reviewed and then accepted or rejected
• ... and where users can record their identity (from IDs in GEDCOM files and HTML files with microformat markup) and be notified when items of interest in their own ancestry get updated in their shared data files.

However, I'm sorry to say that my whole presentation was misguided:

• The user stories were too broad and ambitious to really fit the simple thesis implied by my title (where I originally aimed to make it a very simple, easy-to-use tool).
• The technical elements I reviewed and combined were more suited toward more advanced developers (and not the audience I attracted... which was small, by the way).

Basically, I still have a lot to learn about giving an effective presentation.  Well, it's been a good learning experience.  I've put online the syllabus and the final presentation, for what they're worth.  Let's hope I get a chance to refactor/reformulate/resurrect this again.

Tools and Intro to P2P Collaboration

OK, after researching, experimenting, and building, I can report on collaboration via P2P.

First, to restate the goal: I want to share family histories and other files, some with just my family and some with the whole world, and do it in a way that we all share the benefits as we each work on our own copies.  Yes, I said "copies": everyone should be able to play with all their data, on their own machine, with whatever tools they choose.  For more sample uses, see familyhistories.info.

Now, a single paragraph for this year in review: after failing to create a workable plugin for one P2P program, I found that all file sharing is not equal, but it's close enough... so it seemed a good idea to make something to cooperate with most file-sharing tools/models.  Thus began P2P-Docs, a program to keep track of your file libraries as well as the other copies of similar content that other people might be working on.  You point it to the files that others are sharing with you ("incoming") and the files that you are sharing with others ("outgoing"), and it will assist you in reviewing and reconciling changes as they get passed around.  It's wrapped with a simple search program, mostly to make it attractive bait for my relatives to be able to search for stories in our shared family histories.  So it feels good to have a deliverable as well as more instructions for actual use.

I've started inviting family and friends to share files.  I hope to have some back-and-forth collaboration before RootsTech 2012.  If you'd like to test out some sharing, contact me.

So... you can see there's a bunch of items that are "not done yet" in my project README.  I want to make these tools and instructions more useful for transferring files.  I'm most excited to give my peeps good tools to search through their information; I love the idea of organizing content by assigning semantics.  It's meaningful work (ha!).  But seriously... someday I assume our computers will parse through all our content and understand it completely enough that it can find everything for us... but even then, we determine what is interesting and important, and we'll apply these values as we search for answers and/or meaning in the electronic records being gathered.  Anyway, if you're interested in any aspect of this, well, interest is what drives what I do, so let's talk.  :-)

A Private Network of Data and Events (used to share family histories, and more)

I'm very excited about the future of sharing information.  Now, there are many projects that help distribute and share your stuff, but there aren't too many that allow you to keep it all to yourself but also share it selectively if you want.  I feel that nuance of private ownership is important: it may not seem like a big deal to let Facebook and Yahoo and Flickr host your data, until they shut down services or delete your account or send your info to the FBI.  I've been motivated by this interview of Eben Moglen published by the P2P Foundation... it really opened my eyes to the possibilities if we were to take charge of our own data on our own machines.

So I'm trying to make my own private network, where my friends share my data and can get updates if they like.

The first use case is for family histories:  I've started collecting histories of my ancestors, and I'm part of an organization with a large family database.  Now, I've put up a search where someone can find histories for people in their own ancestry.  The next step is to enable a text search through those histories, and also allow people to add other histories to the collection... but I've realized that, rather than build a central internet service where people go, I'd like to make it easy for people to have their own copies and use it all in their own private network.  I plan to share history (or even personal) files such that friends will get updates easily, then allow for tagging the history files with genealogical identifiers so that people can pull the ones of interest... and maybe even just pull pieces of data, such as small bits of data that might be part of my own ancestral database.

Does this kind of stuff already exist?  If so, please send me pointers.  If not, this may deserve a name... maybe P2P with events..  P2P3.  :-)

Here are some some other projects and people I'm watching closely:

• anything about the "personal data store/locker"
• Pull by David Siegel
• VRM, information cards
• Google's Data Liberation Front
• Phil Windley, Doc Searls, Dave Winer
• Diaspora (a distributed social network)
• something Sam Curren is doing (dunno what yet)

...

(Wow.  I started writing this to share some concrete ideas, and it just devolved into a general overview with no details; I even published that stuff above, forgetting my original intent.)

Here are my requirements:

• Share files with selected people
• Share groups of files with groups of people
• Share between individuals without the need of any central server
• Notify me about changes to files, and show me just those changes
• Notify me about new files someone has added, and let me choose whether to add it to mine
• Ideally: do the same for bits of information, such as ancestor data found in a history
• Install easily on Windows, Mac, Linux

I don't envision this as a platform for all types of information; it will most likely be less convenient than Facebook and Google... but I hope to help this type of technology mature such that people find it easy and important to store some of their info this way.

So here's my somewhat-more-concrete plan:

• Find some P2P program to leverage for sharing files (AllianceP2P looks interesting)
• Build plugins or something that defines which files to share and with whom
• Manage additions, eg. when a history file is added then my network will be notified of the addition
• Manage updates, eg. when a blog file is updated then my network will be notified of the update and be able to review the change
• Manage changes to linked data (and this part could be really fun), eg. have an ancestor database that notifies me when there's a change to the dataset (RDF?) in the histories in my ancestry while ignoring changes to branches that aren't in my line

Next step:

1. I can use AllianceP2P to define my own network of people and files to share.  Use that as the transport to sync files, and write a local app to detect changes to files and allow me to see the updates.

I'd love to hear your impressions.

Clever, Constructive Conversation (About Technology)

Come join us in an open-ended forum about technology.  This is modeled after Phil Windley's CTO Breakfast.  You can see the results of previous discussion here with my event reports.

The difference is the location: we'll do this at venues in Salt Lake City.  Fri Jan 17 2013 is at the Gateway above Jason's Deli, 2nd floor.  (Past incarnations: Max at about 70th S and 13th E; Newmont U at downtown SLC.)

You can count on bagels. (At least, you can at this location; someday we may do it in a cafeteria or restaurant, so be sure to watch the location and confirm whether food is provided or available for purchase.)

As for dates, here is the calendar and here is the iCal info. (For you real-time watchers, follow me on Twitter.)  Afterward, you can see any notes I took in this feed.

If you're interested, you're invited. Cheers!

---

Motivation: amazing things happen when you get together with smart people who speak their minds freely! I've had a great time at Phil's CTO Breakfast events, where many intelligent and well-networked people sit and talk in an open forum about current events and interesting projects and even crazy ideas. In the same vein, the Kynetx conferences have been eye-opening (and mind-blowing), partly because smart people come but mostly because they encourage conversations; they even had 2 "unconference" sessions where the topics and conversations were run by attendees, chosen dynamically (15 minutes before they happened). The experience is always memorable.

Doc Searls' talk about "The Intention Economy" at Kynetx 2009

We're trapped into thinking that a "free market" means "your choice of captivity (vendor)".

Even with social media, each site is a silo. So how do we get to personal, and "prove that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one?"

VRM (vendor relationship management) is one approach for us consumers, the reciprocal of and complimentary to CRM.

• manage our own health care data, eg. PHR (personal health records)
• "personal RFP" for my personal needs
• assert our own terms of service
• "Have governance of and by - and not just for - the people"

Take a look at Public Radio Player, where the VRM "CD" logo gives their VRM compliance level.

See projectvrm.org

Need a "4th-party": someone who helps the buyer relate to the sellers (and their 3rd-parties).

Quote of the day: "We're all climbing up the volcano of Google and allowing their free software to wash over us." There is currently an advertising bubble, because it's all guesswork; we need this infrastructure to empower customers, and Google will take a hit when it crashes.

(Doc recommends the online comic "Gaping Point.")

(BTW, Doc never answered the question: "How do we prove that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one?")

Use Cases for Genealogical Semantic Data

I'm involved with the Thomas Tolman Family Organization (focused on genealogy work and family histories), and there's a discussion going on in the FamilySearch developer network about the potential utility of semantic data along with the genealogical data. I wrote the following examples of ways this could be beneficial to us. (I'm including it in this blog because these ideas touch on future projects that would give extra meaning to people as they do family history research.)

• The source and/or genealogist who submitted the data has an impact on how trustworthy the data is. This is especially important since FamilySearch contains competing data; there are many places where existing FamilySearch data is not correct for our family. Naturally, there are genealogy researchers whom I trust more so I would prefer to see their datasets. Also, we'll tend to trust that data which has the largest number of references (and some references are more trustworthy than others), so that may be a criteria for what data I want to search through. Even though we're not actively working on integrating with FamilySearch right now, it seems that this issue comes up every month in our executive meeting.
  
• When doing genealogy research, the source locations and/or genealogists can be good information to correlate. After our president came back from a trip to Boston, he heard about a source site that he was near and could have visited, but he didn't know about it at the time; our genealogist spends time contacting people in America and Europe besides hours in libraries locally, and it would be nice for her to be able to see what other lines she could extend by asking a few more questions at the same source; we maintain old documents and we just learned of some old journals that were donated to a library because the person didn't know there was a family organization, and he is now making extra effort to either recover them for us or get us copies. These are cases where we would benefit from tools combing through the meta-data, much of which is now simply contained in notes. This could even be the beginning of another social network, where genealogists might find, collaborate, and even rank the dependability of other genealogists. :-)
  
• This one may not apply directly to genealogical data: my interest is in the personal histories, and allowing people to find histories for their ancestors and search for (and tag?) the things that are meaningful to them. These free-form documents will benefit a lot from semantic tags, allowing people to find correlations with concurrent historical events, with other families, and maybe even with other living individuals with the same interests.