Author Archives: Jaye Lapachet

Pokemon Go Articles and Information

I keep coming across interesting articles about Pokemon Go! There is a lot of grumbling about it, some of which is justified. I think it is amazing in a lot of ways:

  • has great potential for orientation and team building in large companies
  • is getting people out and walking
  • highlighting little known historic places in communities
  • keeps people in their community by augmenting their community with pop culture in which they are interested
  • A lot of people, regardless of age, are engaging int he game. We had a multi-generational discussion about it over family dinner the other night. Even my 90YO MIL knew about it and was interested.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list; go out and search on your own for the zillion other articles. 😉

Everything Librarians Need To Know About Pokemon Go!

“You’ve seen the Facebook posts. You’ve seen the headlines, you’ve heard about it in conversation, and you may have seen groups of teens and young adults walking around in odd places with smartphones and simultaneously bewildered and overjoyed expressions. But what is is this game? Why is everyone so excited, and how can I use it at my library?”

The above clip is from The Intersect Alert is a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.

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From Andrea at MCI/SLA

Here’s an article about the way some non-profits have incorporated Pokemon Go. 

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Bronwyn from Victoria, BC pointed out a Reddit article and says she ” saw this fantastic post [no login required to view link] at the top of the front page. For those unfamiliar with the game; don’t assume that this is a youth-oriented opportunity only. My 20-something and 30-something friends are all over this game and appear to be following it wherever the pokemon lead!”

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Austin Gipanski’s article highlights the fitness aspect of technology including Pokemon Go!, but also talking about other digital products such as FitBit, MyFitnessPal as well as Employee Wellness Programs. He talks about the motivations of getting moving and how TV fits in.

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ResearchBuzz’s Tara says “I really am trying to keep the Pokestuff to a minimum, but I thought it was fascinating that Delaware State Parks was so fast off the mark that it’s already launched a Pokemon Go contest. “On Monday, the Division of Parks and Recreation launched ‘Poké Park Adventure,’ a contest for Pokémon trainers of all ages. To win, players must take a screenshot of their avatar in one of Delaware’s state parks, and then take screenshots of each Poké Stop that they visit. Then, players must upload the screenshot to social media and use the hashtag #pokeparkde.” “(ResearchBuzz, 7-21-2016)

Poor Content Management Affects Customer Service

I also know about content management and customer service. One affects the other. I am, however, no expert on the grocery business, though I do know that margins are tight, which makes me assume that customers are valuable.

I recently visited a large chain grocery store in an effort to find Egg Replacer by Ener-G. I thought, going in, that chances were slim that I would find it there. Thus, my expectation was already for failure.

I wasn’t familiar with Egg Replacer by Ener-G and I didn’t look it up before I left so I wasn’t sure what the container looked like. This store has a cooler section of ‘eggs’ in little cartons that do not have shells or have already been separated so I looked there first. I didn’t find any product I thought might be the item for which I was looking. I headed over to the baking section. This store does have quite a few options for those with allergies and I looked carefully, but didn’t see what I wanted.

Thanks to http://www.clipartguide.com

Thanks to http://www.clipartguide.com

The store has very few people roaming around to offer assistance. The only person who wasn’t busy was the self checkout monitoring lady. I asked her for what I wanted and this is where the problems started:

  1. Helping me was not her job, so she tried to brush me off.
  2. She didn’t really understand what I wanted and, clearly, wasn’t interested in learning.
  3. She made no effort to get help for my question on her own.

Being deeply embroiled in databases and helping people find information makes these qualities are deeply ingrained in my professional psyche. I suggested she look it up in her database of products.

Blank stare.

I asked her if she had access to a system that would allow her to search for the product I wanted.

She stammered that she didn’t think she had access to such a system.

I stared blankly back at her willing her to suggest she call someone to help (customer service!!!). She didn’t come up with that solution until I suggested it.

I waited until the manager finally arrived, asked my question and was told, as I expected, that they did not carry Egg Replacer by Ener-G. I suggested to the manager that people on the floor should have access to some kind of content management system so he would not have to be bothered by such easy questions. I also suggested that the floor staff get additional customer service training since they were on the front lines with customers, which meant they had a direct effect on business. He said he agreed, though he was probably just jollying me along, but that there wasn’t much he could do about it.

Lessons from the Trenches:

  • Customer service is everything. They had a opportunity to renew my faith in their store, even if they didn’t have the Egg Replacer by Ener-G, through an excellent customer service experience.
  • Content/information is valuable. If your information is not organized and employees can’t find it and use it to provide a good customer service experience, you are doing a disservice to your business.
  • Training is key. Customer service skills do not always come naturally to people (I don’t blame the self-checkout monitoring lady for her lack of skills). If employees, such as the self-checkout monitoring lady, don’t have training in customer service, they cannot, necessarily, deliver a good customer service experience.

Content Management costs money, but it is also the foundation of good business practices and saves money in the end. If your information is organized, then employees can find it and reuse it. Recreating existing, but missing, poorly organized or lost, information costs money.

Decentralized Web Summit pt.8: Some Impressions

See Part 1
See Part 2
See Part 3
See Part 4
See Part 5
See Part 6
See Part 7

FWIW, these are my impressions.

There is a lot of data being moved or stored – or applications being produced to move and store data – in a secure and private manner. Somehow this impression makes me think of boys and fast cars. Not so much is being discussed about being able to find it again. Not much talk of metadata or finding aids. Of course, finding aids point to a location, which can compromise privacy.

Bitcoin is a big deal in this crowd, which is interesting since my experience comes from one CSI episode and some references I have read. I have no idea how to even buy bitcoin. I looked it up and found that you can’t even find the value without signing up with a bank that has bitcoin. So much for privacy.

There was a lot said about bringing some of these apps to the browser, because the browser was more universal. Having to install programs/software/applications is a barrier.

Women were present, and Primavera De Filippi even spoke, as did Mitchell Baker. Most of the audience and presenters were men with beards and t-shirts. As I said, only Vint Cerf wore a suit. The men weren’t, however, the stereotypical computer geek. Many of them had, or were working on PhDs and could talk intelligently in front of an audience.

There doesn’t seem to be any thought given to making any of these tools, applications, ideas available in anyway to the commercial world. If there was some common ground found or some small way that commercial entities could use some of these tools, they might get a wider audience.

There is a role for librarians if we make ourselves known to this segment of the Internet community and keep harping about access, findability and metadata.

Check back. I may add more impressions.

Listen/watch the video of the whole conference for more detail and more information.

Resources:

Decentralized Web Summit pt.7: Lightening Talks

See part 1
See part 2
See part 3
See part 4
See part 5
See part 6

Lightening Talks were 5 minute introductions to various concepts, products and service being discussed or showcased at the conference. Most, if not all of the lightening talks were followed up with a workshop after so more people could understand the concept and technology behind the product or service.

Jae Kwon (@jaekwon; jae [at] tendermint [dot] com), Tendermint: his product creates a better solution to consensus for services such a Bitcoin.

“With Tendermint TMSP, you can write smart-contracts in any programming language. Leverage existing codebases, workflows, and development ecosystems to build complex & production-quality applications.” They are working on an Apache webserver for WordPress.

GnuClear is a new architecture for Blockchain scaling. It is built on top of Tendermint. GnuClear (I think) is not very good at inter-Blockchain communication, especially for proof of work. Shard1 and Shard2 communicate through a hub. They are mostly interested in money.

GnuClear Uses

  • pegging to other cryptocurrencies
  • Ethereum scaling
  • Multi-application integration
  • network partition migration
  • federated name resolution system
  • Can have own governance system with own rules

It requires its own distribution system

  • identified entities

GnuClear Governance is interesting. They do not just have Yay or Nay voting. You lose something if you abstain or vote no. The loss depends on other voters and what the issue is.

Michael Grube, FreeNet

FreeNet is a decentralized distributed censorship resistant datastore

It can transmit data securely

The communication system withing Freenet is not very robust. They use IRL, and FB-like system, etc.

Uses

  • Publish content
  • Publish and turn off computer without people losing access

Nerdagedon is a list of FreeSites

Sone (sp??) is an FB clone

There is a vibrant community of developers who have developed

  • GitHub sites
  • Wikis
  • Forums
  • IRL
  • etc

It uses 3 kinds of keys

  • CHK – content hashkey share
  • USK – updatable subspace key
  • SSK – signed subspace key (contributor with a key)

There is content moderation

  • I don’t know if filtering is also part of it.
  • They use Web of Trust, which mostly works for them.

They only have a primitive search function, which uses webcrawlers and allows users to search on a keyword.

Motivations

  • configure routing bases on reputation
  • people sharing files and developers using it now

I still get the impression that moving data is morning important that the data itself and finding information again later.

Muneeb Ali, Blockstack (@muneeb)

Users own their identity with a private key

naming is separate from identity

You pay for your own storage.

They also have a GitHub.

Devon Read, Alexandria

This presentation was one of the best and most understandable that I saw, but it made me angry. They named their product after the Great Library of Alexandria. They call this product a library, but it is really iTunes without being iTunes.

They call it a decentralized library which allows for publishing content, is censorship free. It doesn’t have a lot of content and even less free content, but could be used for free content. It isn’t used for that now. They used the word library because of the implication of storing as much as possible. It is more of an artistic clearing house, like iTunes, than a library

They want librarians to organize stuff, but they don’t have any librarians or metadata analysts working for them now.

There are a lot of paywalls and you pay with Bitcoin.

Resources:

Decentralized Web Summit pt.6: Lightening Talks

June 9 was the second day of the conference. For more info:

See part 1
See part 2
See part 3
See part 4
See part 5

Lightening Talks were 5 minute introductions to various concepts, products and service being discussed or showcased at the conference. Most, if not all of the lightening talks were followed up with a workshop after so more people could understand the concept and technology behind the product or service.

The first round was 45 minutes late, because a number of the speakers just didn’t show up. This would never happen at a librarian conference and the audience didn’t know what was going on. I went and talked to my friend and found out. I thought it was really unprofessional for the speakers to bail, but it could be part of the decentralized culture.

Brian Warner talked about Tahoe-LAFS. They also have a GitHub site. LAFS stands for least authority file store. It uses other computers (friends, family, etc) for storage. Information is encrypted before it leaves your system. A ‘hash’ was included in the discussion. It has a feature/functionality called ‘magic folders’, which is a two way sync like DropBox. There is a web interface and it is written in Python. You have to make your own arrangements with storage providers directly.

Stefan Thomas (@justmoon) talked about his site, Interledger. Money is the first social network. Interledger is a protocol. It is a way to record money transactions because you don’t want to duplicate transactions. This is called a managing ledger. Their goal is to make it cheap, instant, global (imagine buying something with Euros when the price is in American dollars), scalable. Bitcoin was distributed and is a good start. Bitcoin is open source so you can make changes to the code. IP allows people to communicate with others on different networks. You can’t, however send an email to SnapChat. There are two basic functions: addressing and fragmentation.

Interledger addresses. It uses decimal amounts and has protocols that are part of a stack. They are in the process of writing plugins for different ledgers (e.g. PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay and others).

Natalie Meyers is from the Center for Open Science (COS). She talked about the mission of COS, which is to preserve the data used for scientific experiments so that the experiments can be replicated.

She talked about metascience and the infrastructure COS is working on. They have an Open Science Framework which allows scientists to pass information through tools they are already using. This will be used to investigate how software and operating systems influenced project data. part of their mission is to collaborate in order to promote openness.

Making behaviors visible promotes adoption.

She also discussed better stewardship of scientific data.

Juan Benet: IPFS – he mentioned a ‘merkle’ in his talk about the Interplanetary File System. IPFS has versioning of datastructures. IPFS tells you how to name and move info.

Arkady Kukarkin talked about his company, MediaChain. It is an open and universal media library, decentralized database that provides a unique content ID. Anyone can participate.

There is image recognition so that two versions/instances of the same image have the same content ID and can be discussed as the same. They preserve the raw metadata with ingestion (uploading). People who own images/artworks can amend or retract records, but not edit.There is a log that shows the history of the record. It has similar qualities to Shazam, which tells you the artist of the song when you are listening.

This is a concept about which I am really excited. I want to participate so I can mark my artwork as mine and don’t have to deal with the IG “I forgot where I found this image” issue again.

Other Notes:

Cloudfleet is your own personal data center and some great sounding features.

Resources:

    • Cloudfleet
    • MediaChain
    • MediaChain on Facebook (page is in Polish or Russian)
    • Center for Open Science (COS)
    • Open Science Framework (part of COS)
    • Cryptographic hash function, a derivation of data used to authenticate message integrity
    • Fragment identifier, in computer hypertext, a string of characters that refers to a subordinate resource
    • Hash function, a derivation of data, notably seen in cryptographic hash functions
    • Hash table, a data structure
    • hash (Unix), an operating system command
    • slack.mediachain.com
    • github.com/mediachain
    • Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality.[1][2] It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. (Wikipedia)
    • The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[15] Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.[11]:ch. 8 The block chain is a distributed database – to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount), each network node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[11]:ch. 5 (Wikipedia)
    • InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. Nodes in the IPFS network form a distributed file system. IPFS is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with help from the open source community.[1] It was initially designed by Juan Benet.[2] (Wikipedia)
    • Cory Doctorow’s presentation
      Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
      Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit

Decentralized Web Summit pt.5: Panels & Talks

See part 1

See part 2

See part 3

See part 4

Security in a World of Black Hats

We all know that spam, phishing, hacks, identity theft, etc are big money and a big pain. This panel talked about what they are doing in their companies and strategies.

Ross Schulman, Open Tech Institute

Van Jacobson, Google

Mike Perry, Tor

Paige Peterson, MaidSafe

Brian Warner, Tahoe LAFS

One strategy they suggested was using safer code languages. Paige said that MaidSafe products are being rewritten in older languages. She mentioned C++, but I am not sure if they are using that or C++ was an example. I guess those older languages aren’t dead.

There is also something called a Freedom Box, which allows an individual to host their own part of the web. I’d like to take a look at this.

The speakers talked in general terms about what their companies are doing, but couldn’t make specific details public because the event was being livestreamed. That would open them up to hacking and other nastiness.

Moonshot Challenge: What Can You Do?

Juan Benet: websites divorced from locations

Trent McConaghy, Big Chain DB and IPDB: decentralize at scale

Karissa McKelvey, The DAT Project: breaking open scientific data

Denis Nazarov, MediaChain: connect content creators with audiences. MediaChain is an open universal media library that provides a content id to your artwork. This idea keeps the owner/creator information with the image.

Evan Schwartz, Interledger, an Internet protocol for money: he is interested int he future of money. He wants to help payment systems talk to each other. I actually had some idea what this company was talking about. If you use Google Pay and your vendor uses PayPal, Interledger will allow your systems to talk to each other so that you can still pay. In my mind, it gives everyone choices about what payment system works for them and doesn’t require us to have multiple passwords and our money spread around. Interledger helps with the routing of packets of money across networks. It will lead to agnostic payment systems

IPFS is a peer to peer hypermedia protocol

 

Resources:

    • slack.mediachain.com
    • github.com/mediachain
    • Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality.[1][2] It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. (Wikipedia)
    • The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[15] Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.[11]:ch. 8 The block chain is a distributed database – to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount), each network node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[11]:ch. 5 (Wikipedia)
    • InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. Nodes in the IPFS network form a distributed file system. IPFS is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with help from the open source community.[1] It was initially designed by Juan Benet.[2] (Wikipedia)
    • Cory Doctorow’s presentation
      Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
      Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit

Decentralized Web Summit pt.4: Panels & Talks

See part 1

See part 2

See part 3

After the Big Guns, others started to talk. There were panels, lightening talks, workshops and informal meal socials.

Peer to Peer Networks

The first talk was a panel about Peer to Peer networks. I was thinking that we already have that when someone else echoed my thoughts. Kevin Marks of Indie Labs was the moderator and the panel included Feross Aboukhadijeh of WebTorrent, David Dias or Protocol Labs & IPFS, Zooko Wilcox of Zocash & Tahoe LAFS and Gavin Wood of Epthcore (sp??), Etheory and Ethereum.

In this section, Kevin asked questions and answers were given by the most interested or qualified person. In some cases, questions were directed at certain panelists. All of the panelists are clearly passionate about their projects.

They don’t think links are as fragile as the Big Guns made them out to be.

Zcash has privacy in the payment system, which prevents censorship.

Public applications are saved to the network without having data in once centralized location. They think this helps find content on a network. I wonder how and if there is an opportunity for content management

Ethereum decentralized http post allows transactions within post request (filling out a form on the web) with no server on the other end.

Webtorrent – they are trying to make a torrent client that runs in the browser. Other torrent clients have to be installed, which is a barrier.

Visitors help host various sites

Torrents area and efficient way to send data across the web

Naming and User IDs in the Decentralized Web

Again this was a panel with a moderator. Participants included:

Chelsea Barbaras – moderator

Muneeb Ali (@muneeb), Blockstack

Joachim Lohkamp, Jolocom and Ouishare

Jeremy Rand, Namecoin

One of the things I liked about this talk was that right away they acknowledged that the decentralization of the web is not an intuitive thought for most people. One person gave an example of 10 sites being involved when a person types an address into the browser bar.

Naming matters.

They want to decouple data from applications. This would help with archiving issues such as not having the software to run and look at data.

Building Values Into the Decentralized Web

Amber Case – Calm Technology

Primavera De Filippi – Backfeed and Coala

Max Ogden (@denormalize) – DAT Project

Wendy Seltzer – W3C

Peter Van Gardenen – Artefactual Systems

One of the speakers said that decentralization should be a means a different object NOT the object itself, which I think is fairly profound. I can’t say I noticed that people wanted to decentralize the web in order to decentralize the web. Many listed privacy, anti-censorship, etc as reasons behind it. I got the impression that there are a limited number of reasons, which might focus the effort, but also not be enough.

provenance of information

  • authentication
  • how do I trust it?
  • does it have good metadata?
  • are there multiple copies?

Bandwidth and storage of commodities of the Internet. I never thought of it like this, but it is true.

Resources:

    • Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality.[1][2] It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. (Wikipedia)
    • The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[15] Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.[11]:ch. 8 The block chain is a distributed database – to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount), each network node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[11]:ch. 5 (Wikipedia)
    • InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. Nodes in the IPFS network form a distributed file system. IPFS is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with help from the open source community.[1] It was initially designed by Juan Benet.[2] (Wikipedia)
    • Cory Doctorow’s presentation
      Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
      Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit

Decentralized Web Summit pt.3: Big Guns

See Part 1
See Part 2

Sir Tim Berners-Lee @timberners_lee

He is the director of the WWW Consortium. He was really hard for me to understand. He is so smart and talks so fast that mere mortals have to run to catch up. He made some excellent points

Sites/services such as FB, Flickr, Instagram don’t talk to each other. Those sites are silos. These sites display the siloization of the web.

=> When I heard him say that it occurred to me that mobile devices are creating a bridge (nota bene: NOT a solution or breaking down the silos) in that photos are stored in one place to the different silos have access to them. This still means that you don’t have to go to different places to find the photos to upload.

=> While you can click on the ‘share with Twitter’ button within Instagram, the tweet still refers the reader back to Instagram.

People think that consumers sold their souls to get web/app services for free.

He wants a place to store that individuals can control

  • He is working on a project called Solid

Locking the Web Open / Brewster Kahle

Can web openness be irrevocable?

Can web openness be baked into the infrastructure?

  • Build archiving into the cloud

The more access is available, the more a site is used (e.g. Amazon Cloud moves sites around and replicates them for a larger fee if they get more popular)

Reader privacy is an issue that came up a few times at the conference

 

 

Listen/watch the video of the whole conference for more detail and more information.

Resources:

Cory Doctorow’s presentation
Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit

Decentralized Web Summit pt.2: Big Guns

See part 1.

As I said the concept of the “Decentralized Web” wasn’t made very clear at the Summit. Everyone seemed to know what everyone else was talking about.

Mitchell Baker (one of the few women and a powerhouse in her own right) explained it like this:

  • Agency. User agent can choose how to interpret content provided by a service offering.
  • Immediate. Safe, instant access to content accessible via a universal address (similar to http) without an install.
  • Open. Anyone can publish content without permission or barriers and provide access as they see fit.
  • Universal. Content runs on any device or any platform.

The above description is what I tried to keep in my head throughout the Summit. The questions it brought up were:

  1. Is this a new concept or am I just learning about the movement?
  2. Are these concepts coming around again after 20 years as they seem familiar principles from when I first got on the web?

Vint Cerf @vintcerf

Vint Cerf came next. He is a VP & Chief Internet Strategist at Google. He didn’t talk much about Google and didn’t do the gratuitous mentions (much) like many do. Instead he talked about the Digital Dark Ages, which is a time we are in now where content we think is permanent blinks on and off. Files simply disappear and links die.

He is advocating for a Self Archiving Web.

What we have learned from the Internet is that the following is important:

  • Collaboration and Cooperation
  • Open design and an evolution process
  • Anyone can join by following the protocols
  • Multiple business models are acceptable
  • Modular, layered evolution
    • who really cares about how packets are being carried as long as they are delivered?
  • E plurbis unum

Thinking Out Loud

Some of the things that Cerf mentioned were compression schemes and what they could and couldn’t do, Tarball and related formats, the importance of storing and being able to recover particular objects as well as the storage of software with versioning. Imagine a world where you have a lot of digital stuff, but you can’t access it because you don’t have the software.

Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is starting to ‘archive’ the web. Even they admit their efforts are inadequate. They take snapshots of sites. They are time indexed copies. Hyperlinks don’t work. Hyperlinks will have to be reformed to resolve with other archived (snapshot) sites “InArchive” pages.

A complete archiving effort for the web has to be:

  • self-contained
  • include continuous crawling
  • determine how to decide when to create a new instance
    • Is there a role for RSS??

Then he had a random question: Does a set of all sets include itself?

=>This question alone made the whole conference worth it. This type of question would never come up in the corporate world. If you think about it, it will start to blow your mind.

Environmental Thoughts

The web can hardly contain itself. Is there room to replicate it? (LOCKSS)

Hyperlinks deteriorate with time

  • Perhaps we need a permanent link – something like digital object identifiers

HTMLx rendering challenge: backward compatibility

What about permissions, access control, copyrights

  • these cause problems for archiving over decades or centuries

Some Basic Thoughts

  • Automatic, cooperative replication of created web pages could be part of the publication process.
  • Is there a role for something like Good docs property of replication/real-time synchronization?
  • Could there be a reference space (like a reference room in a  library) held in common by cooperating web archives?

More Thinking Out Loud

  • Is there a role for publication/subscription mechanisms for cooperative and other entities?
  • A lot of metadata is needed to replicate some kind of Time Machine feature
  • A library of rendering/interpretation software is needed to correctly render archival material on the web
    • there is a whole subtext of permission to use here
    • how do you use software over time (decades, centuries) when companies go out of business, go bankrupt (and the judge won’t give you access because it’s an asset)
  • Guaranteeing backward compatibility is a good goal, but not practical over hundreds of years.

Surfing the Self Archiving Web

  • Multiple, alternative resolution targets (shouldn’t matter which is chosen if the system works right)
  • Note: static media of newspaper and magazines and books are snapshots of a ‘work’ in time. We have editions. People can see the work as it existed at that time and something similar might be valuable for the web and digital objects.

Desirable Properties

  • Auto-archiving upon publication?
  • could auto-archiving be a service for which you sign up? How would it be funded?
  • Registration of rendering engines (and permissioning system?)
  • Auto-malware filters
  • Fidelity levels
    • everything works
    • surface display only (no links)
    • other? e.g. can see there is a video, but don’t have software or rights to render it so user can only see part of the object
  • Once archived, is a page an indelible and unalterable instance? Could it be useful in a court of law?
    • could different levels of fidelity have different uses, e.g. an official version?
  • Is there an ‘official records’ side effect of making Self Archiving web work?
  • Can such a system work for encrypted content?
  • Can access to parts of the archive be access controlled
    • e.g. release after 25 years?
    • what about a separate archive of encryption keys?
    • could metadata be added to trigger access?
  • Is there a role for containers?
    • all information needed to do rendering would be held in one container
      • Google is doing this for the Android Framework
  • Apps?
    • What is their role in the structure above?
    • How would they be shown/displayed in 25 years?
    • Would an index of information for apps help render them?
    • archive of apps
    • digital dioramas
  • Digital vellum could be an ad model + a subscription model + a service model

We discussed the right to be forgotten in a digital archiving space

  • In order to wipe something out you have to remember it because you have to know it in order to get rid of it (another mind blower!)

 

 

 

Listen/watch the video of the whole conference for more detail and more information.

Resources:

Cory Doctorow’s presentation
Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit

 

 

 

 

 

 

Decentralized Web Summit pt.1

I spent the last day and a half at the Decentralized Web Summit.

My head is about to explode. Seriously.

This conference was so out of my normal scheme that it really shook things up for me. I don’t think that it will blow my life into a new stratosphere or anything, but I know about things that I didn’t know about before. I have heard of things that I don’t understand and I have participated in a cultural group that is really different from the librarians, knowledge managers and content management people with whom I normally interact. It was an eye opener.

The conference was held at the Internet Archive, which owns an old Christian Science building. The former sanctuary (or CS equivalent) still has the pews, but houses the servers that run the Internet Archive, was where the presentations were held.

The majority of the attendees and presenters were male, but there were a few females, including a few female presenters. Tons of t-shirts, only one suit (that I saw), beards, boots. The new uniform.

If the building had been bombed, the history of hte Internet would have been wiped out, not because the IA servers would have been destroyed (they are backed up offsite), but because most, if not all, of the fathers of the Internet were in attendance: Brewster Kahle, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf (he wore the suit), Cory Doctorow, Richard Sullivan, etc. I was in awe of these guys. I remember when they were were working on making the Internet more open. And here they are again, working for the same thing.

The first issue I had was that I had no idea what a Decentralized Web was. A day and half into the conference, I am still not 100% sure. Wendy Hanamura, the Partnership leader at IA suggested:

  • Open
  • Private
  • Secure
  • Free

She suggested and this was reiterated later, that these values should be ‘baked into the code”.

 

Resources:

Cory Doctorow’s presentation

Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project

Twitter hashtag #DwebSummit