The Refugee Council have expressed their concern at proposed cuts of over 60% for services supporting refugees and asylum seekers from April 2011. For further details, click here.
In the Supreme Court it was found that in reaching decisions that will affect a child; a primacy of importance must be accorded to their interests. For the full judgment, click here.
The Court of Appeal upheld the objective test for maintenance set out in KA and Others (Adequacy of maintenance) Pakistan  UKAIT 00065. For the full judgment, click here.
The Court of Appeal also set out helpful guidance for age dispute cases. For the full judgment, click here.
For analysis from the barristers who appeared in the case, click here.
The Upper Tribunal held that an Immigration Judge should not go behind evidence of a certificate of naturalisation as an Italian citizen on the basis of concerns about the bona fides of the marriage that resulted in the naturalisation. It would be contrary to public policy for the Immigration Judge to dispute Italian nationality or the legal validity of the marriage resulting from it. For the full judgment, click here.
The Upper Tribunal found that decision makers should not allow alleged near-misses under the Immigration Rules, which, on a proper analysis, are an attempt to import extraneous qualifications into the applicable rule. For the full judgment, click here.
The Upper Tribunal held that in considering the relevance of a policy, some thought should be given to the intention that appears to lie behind the policy. Policies may have been more loosely drafted than an immigration rule, and the discretion which it imports ought to be exercised by the respondent at first instance. For the full judgment, click here.
HJT Training offer their revision and examination technique course specifically aimed at those following the OISC accreditation scheme examination at Level 1 on. For full details, click here.


Kyadondo East MP Robert Kyagulanyi aka Bobi Wine and three other legislators; Francis Zaake (Mityana Municipality), Paul Mwiru (Jinja Municipality), Gerald Karuhanga (Ntungamo Municiplaity), as well as Kasiano Wadri, the Arua Municipality by-election contestant are being held.
According to reports, Robert Kyagulanyi is being held at a military barracks. There were reports that he was at Bondo Military Barracks, Arua. However, reports from his camp claim that he was airlifted to Kampala then transferred to Bombo Military Barracks.
According to police, the legislators and 30 others are being held abusing traffic regulations and causing a violent attack on President Museveni's motorcade.
"The legilators are among 34 others that abused traffic rules and regulations and violently attacked the motorcade of President Museveni. It happened as the president's motorcade and the politicians drove in opposite directions", Emilian Kayima, Police spokesperson stated.
There are unconfirmed reports alleging that the other legislators including Arua Municipality by-election contestant Kasiano Wadri have been transferred to Gulu as voting is underway.
The other people detained are; Micheal Mabike, Night Asarah, Jane Abola, Caroline Nalubowa, Rasul Ismail, Onen Muhammad, Simon Edega, Bashir Ejotre, Nelson Mandela, Sam Draji, Maida Akara, Andama Doka, William Musisi Nyanzi, Juma Amidu, John Bosco Ondogo, Kasim Kyazze, Atiku Shidradan, Noar Butelezi, Asega Jogo, Charles Aniku, Rasul Ondoga, Amidu Galumbe, Wani Aloro, Farouk Abdulrakhim, Bernard Andama, Tom Asiku, Muhammad Ejaga, Gamba Tumusiime, Steven Ojotre, Wilberforce Tamale, Simon Obeti.


For families struggling with the challenges of autism, hope might be the greatest gift.
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Thanks to the dedication and compassion of our staff, and to the support of generous donors like you, VIA has become a lifetime resource for people with autism and their families — "across the spectrum and across their lifespan." As Blair and our other students have grown, VIA has grown with them — from early intervention programs, to family support, to services for the underserved adult population.
Today, Blair is a happy and engaged member of our Adult Academy, enjoying volunteer work, soccer and basketball outings, and engaging with our community.
Please continue to enrich the lives of families in your community struggling with autism by making a generous gift today!


text:
Terms: Phonic Motor
Terms: Electrical Instruments
Terms: Leeds & Northrup Company
Terms: Lamps
Terms: Electrodynamics
Terms: Galvanometers
Weston Electrical Instrument Co., Newark, NJ (18)
H. Tinsey & Co., London (5)
Government Printing Office, Washington, DC (3)
Pierce Chemical Company, Rockford, IL (3)
Edward Paterson, London (2)
Elliott Brothers, London (2)
Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN (2)
MacMillan and Co., Limited, London (2)
McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York and London (2)
American Design Components, New York (1)
American Radio Reley League, Newington, CT (1)
Browning-Drake Corporation, Cambridge, MA (1)
Cambridge Instrument Co., Ltd., London (1)
Cambridge Instrument Company, Inc., London (1)
Cooper Hewitt Electric Co., Hoboken, NJ (1)
Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington, DC (1)
Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi, Cambridge, MA (1)
Eugene Dietzgen Co., Chicago (1)
Flame Publishing Company, Denver, CO (1)
General Electric Company, Cleveland (1)
General Electric Vapor Lamp Co., Hoboken, NJ (1)
Ginn & Company, Boston (1)
H. Georg, Geneva; G. Masson, Paris (1)
Hutchinson & Co., London (1)
Industrial Components Corporation, North Wilbraham, MA (1)
James G. Biddle, Philadelphia (1)
John V. Terry, Carlisle, MA (1)
John Wiley & Sons, New York; Chapman & Hall, Limited, London (1)
Journal of Scientific Instruments, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1)
Keuffel & Esser Co., New York (1)
Kipp & Zonen, Delft, Holland (1)
L. E. Knott Apparatus Company, Cambridge, MA (1)
Lafayette Radio Electronics Corporation, Syosset, NY (1)
Leeds & Northrup Company, Philadelphia, PA (1)
London and New York (1)
C4-D2 (122)
Weston Electrical Instrument Company (19)
Scientific Instruments -- Catalogues (15)
Microscopes (6)
Electrodynamics (6)
H. Tinsey & Co. (5)
Spencer Lens Company (4)
C5-H2 (4)
Heinrich Hertz (3)
Leeds & Northrup (3)
Electricity -- Experiments (2)
Edward Paterson (2)
1872 Catalogue of Electrical Test Instruments
1931 Trouble Shooter's Manual
The 1978-1979 American Design Components First- ource For Electro-Mechanical Equipment and Components
A. C. and D. C. Portable Ammeters and Milliammeters, Model 370: Bulletin 2003-E
A. C. and D. C. Portable Voltmeters, Model 341: Bulletin 2004-E
André Marie Ampère: The Founder of the Science of Electro-Dynamics
Antique Radio Classified
Apparatus for Capacitance, Inductance, and Magnetic Measurements: Catalog 10
Apparatus for Electrical Resistance Measurements: Catalog 40

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: How to convert a jcharArray to a char[] in c I have a jcharArray that is passed into a C program through Java, and I need to know how to use the array in the C program. How do I convert my jcharArray bits into something I can use (char bits[])?
I tried writing this code using JNI
JNIEXPORT jint JNICALL Java_ex_NistStatisticalTestSuite_frequency
  (JNIEnv *env, jclass cls, jcharArray bits, jint jn)
{

    printf("running frequency test");

    int     i;
    double  f, s_obs, p_value, sum, sqrt2 = 1.41421356237309504880;
    int n=jn;
    char deletethis=(char)bits[0];
    sum = 0.0;
    for ( i=0; i<n; i++ )
        sum += 2*1-1;
    s_obs = fabs(sum)/sqrt(n);
    f = s_obs/sqrt2;
    p_value = erfc(f);

    return (jint)p_value;

}

but it fails to compile, saying:

frequency.c:19:2: error: invalid use of undefined type 'struct _jobject'
  char deletethis=(char)bits[0];
  ^~~~
frequency.c:19:28: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type 'struct _jobject'
  char deletethis=(char)bits[0];

A: You must use jni functions, there are at least two methods:
Copy a region:
jchar buf[10];
(*env)->GetCharArrayRegion(env, bits, 0, 10, buf);

lock a memory region in JVM, then access it and finally release:
jchar *carr;
carr = (*env)->GetCharArrayElements(env, bits, NULL);
if (carr == NULL) {
    return 0; /* exception occurred */
}
//for (int i=0; i<10; i++) {
//    do something with carr[i];
//}
(*env)->ReleaseCharArrayElements(env, bits, carr, 0);

Here I assume your array is 10 elements in length. To find out number of elements in the array use GetArrayLength jni function.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Nordstrom Beauty Trend Show 5/24 Get Your Tix!
The Nordstrom Beauty Trend Show is coming to Nordstrom at Perimeter Mall in ATL May 24th! I went a couple of years ago and had a blast!
Grab your girlfriends and reserve your spot for this exciting event! Watch top industry insiders reveal spring's best beauty trends during a high-energy runway show. Then get complimentary makeup, skincare and fragrance consultations full of DIY tips and tricks. Plus, score an exclusive (and free!) Nordstrom tote bag- just for attending.
The show is $20 and then you can use that toward your beauty purchases so it's a win/win! You can set up an appointment at your favorite beauty counter!
NARS will be doing makeovers all day long so even if you can't make the show, you can still get your makeovers and can check out the new collection below. Call them to set up your appointment and to attend the Nordstrom Beauty Trend Show!


text:
Category: EmanciTerm	(page 1 of 2)
A citizen-sovereign way to pay for news—or for any creative work
February 11, 2019 / Doc Searls / Comments Off on A citizen-sovereign way to pay for news—or for any creative work
The Aspen Institute just published a 180-page report by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy titled (in all caps) CRISIS IN DEMOCRACY: RENEWING TRUST IN AMERICA. Its Call to Action concludes,
This is good. Real good. Having Aspen and Knight endorse personal sovereignty as a necessity for solving the crises of democracy and trust also means they endorse what we've been pushing forward here for more than a dozen years.
Since the report says (under Innovation, on page 73) we need to "use technology to enhance journalism's roles in fostering democracy," and that "news companies need to embrace technology to support their mission and achieve sustainability," it should help to bring up the innovation we proposed in an application for a Knight News Challenge grant in 2011. This innovation was, and still is, called EmanciPay. It's a citizen-sovereign way to pay for news, plus all forms of creative production where there is both demand and failing or absent sources of funding.
We have not only needed this for a long time, but it is for lack of it (or of any original and market-based approach to paying for creative work) that the EU is poised to further break our one Internet into four or more parts and destroy the open Web that has done so much to bring the world together and generate near-boundless forms of new wealth and productivity. The EU's hammer for breaking the open Web is the EU Copyright Directive, which has been under consideration and undergoing steady revision since 2016. Cory Doctorow, writing for the EFF, says The Final Version of the EU's Copyright Directive Is the Worst One Yet. One offense (among too many to list here):
Under the final text, any online community, platform or service that has existed for three or more years, or is making €10,000,001/year or more, is responsible for ensuring that no user ever posts anything that infringes copyright, even momentarily. This is impossible, and the closest any service can come to it is spending hundreds of millions of euros to develop automated copyright filters. Those filters will subject all communications of every European to interception and arbitrary censorship if a black-box algorithm decides their text, pictures, sounds or videos are a match for a known copyrighted work. They are a gift to fraudsters and criminals, to say nothing of censors, both government and private.
There are much better ways of getting the supply and demand sides of creative markets together. EmanciPay is one of them, and deserves another airing.
Perhaps now that Knight and Aspen are cheering the citizen-sovereign bandwagon, it's worth open-sourcing our original EmanciPay proposal.
So here it is, copied and pasted out of the last draft before we submitted it. Since much has changed since then (other than the original idea, which is the same as ever only more timely), I've added a bunch of notes at the end, and a call for action. Before reading it, please note two things: 1) we are not asking for money now (we were then, but not now); and 2) while this proposal addresses the challenge of paying for news, it applies much more broadly to all creative work.
10:00pm Monday 31 January 2011
Project Title:
EmanciPay: a user-driven system for generating revenue and managing relationships
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge
Describe your project:
EmanciPay is the first user-driven payment system for news and information media. It is also the first system by which the consumers of media can create and participate in relationships with media — and the first system to reform the legal means by which those relationships are created and sustained.
With EmanciPay, users can easily choose to pay whatever they like, whenever they like, however they like — on their own terms and not just those controlled by the media's supply side. EmanciPay will also provide means for building genuine two-way relationships, rather than relationships defined by each organization's subscription and membership systems. As with Creative Commons, terms will be expressed in text and symbols that can be read easily by both software and people.
While there is no limit to payment choice options with EmanciPay, we plan to test these one at a time. The first planned trials are with Tipsy, which is being developed in alongside EmanciPay, and which also has a Knight News Challenge application. The two efforts are cooperative and coordinated.
EmanciPay belongs to a growing family of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) tools. Both EmanciPay and VRM grew out of work in ProjectVRM, which I launched in 2006, at the start of my fellowship with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In the past four years the VRM development community has grown internationally and today involves many allied noncommercial and commercial efforts. Here is the current list of VRM development projects.
How will your project improve the delivery of news and information to geographic communities?:
Two ways.
First is with a new business model. Incumbent local and regional media currently have three business models: paid delivery (subscriptions and newsstand sales), advertising, and (in the case of noncommercial media) appeals for support. All of these have well-known problems and limitations. They are also controlled in a top-down way by media organizations. By reducing friction and lowering the threshold of payment, EmanciPay will raise the number of customers while also providing direct and useful intelligence about the size and nature of demand. This supports geographic customisation of news and information goods.
Second is by providing ways for both individuals and news organizations to create and sustain relationships that go beyond "membership" (which in too many cases means little more than "we gave money"). EmanciPay will also help consumers of news participate in the news development process. Because EmanciPay is based on open source code and open standards, it can be widely adopted and adapted to meet local needs. CRM (customer relationship management) software companies, many of which supply CRM systems to media organizations, are also awaiting VRM developments. (The cover and much of this CRM Magazine are devoted to VRM.)
What unmet need does your proposal answer?:
EmanciPay meets the need for maximum freedom and flexibility in paying for news and information, and for a media business model that does not depend only on advertising, membership systems, large donors or government grants. (This last one is of special interest at a time when cutting government funding of public broadcasting is a campaign pledge by many freshly elected members of Congress.)
Right now most news and information is free of charge on the Web, even when the same goods are sold on newsstands or through cable TV subscriptions. This fact, plus cumbersome and widely varied membership, pledging and payment systems, serves to discourage payment by media users. Even the membership systems of public broadcasting stations exclude vast numbers of people who would contribute "if it was easy". EmanciPay overcomes these problems by making it easy for consumers of news to become customers of news. It also allows users to initiate real and productive relationships with news organizations, whether or not they pay those organizations.
How is your idea new?:
Equipping individuals with their own tools for choosing what and how to pay, and for creating and maintaining relationships, is a new idea. Nearly all other sustainability ideas involve creating new intermediators or working on improving services on the supply side.
Tying sustainability to meaningful relationships (rather than just "membership" is also new). So is creating means by which individuals can assert their own "terms of service" — and match those terms with those on the supply side.
EmanciPay is also new in the scope of its ambition. Beyond creating a large new source of revenues, and scaffolding meaningful relationships between supply and demand, EmanciPay intends to remove legal frictions from the marketplace as well. What lawyers call contracts of adhesion (ones in which the dominant party is free to change what they please while the submissive party is nailed to whatever the dominant party dictates) have been pro forma on the Web since the invention of the cookie in 1995. EmanciPay is the first and only system intended to obsolete and replace these onerous "agreements" (which really aren't).
Once in place and working, EmanciPay's effects should exceed even those of Creative Commons, because EmanciPay addresses the demand as well as the supply side of the marketplace. And, like Creative Commons, EmanciPay does not require changes in standing law.
Finally, EmanciPay is new in the sense that it is not centralized, and does not require an intermediary. As with email (the protocols of which are open and decentralized, by design), EmanciPay supports both self-hosting and hosting in "the cloud." It is also both low-level and flexible enough to provide base-level building material for any number of new businesses and services.
What will you have changed by the end of the project?:
First, we will have changed the habits and methods by which people pay for the media goods they receive, starting with news and information.
Second, we will have introduced relationship systems that are not controlled by the media, but driven instead by the individuals who are each at the centers of their own relationships with many different entities. Thus relationships will be user-driven and not just organization-driven.
Third, we will have created a new legal framework for agreements between buyers and sellers on the Web and in the networked world, eliminating many of the legal frictions involved in today's e-commerce systems.
Fourth, we will have introduced to the world an intention economy, based on the actual intentions of buyers, rather than on guesswork by sellers about what customers might buy. (The latter is the familiar "attention economy" of advertising and promotion.)
Why are you the right person or team to complete this project?:
I know how to get ideas and code moving in the world. I've done that while running ProjectVRM for the last four years. As of today VRM tools are being developed in many places, by many programmers, in both commercial and noncommercial capacities, around the world, Those places include Boston, London, Johannesburg, Dubuque, Santiago, Belfast, Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara, Vienna, and Seattle. Much of this work has also been advanced at twice-yearly IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) events, which I co-founded in 2005 and continue to help organize.
As Senior Editor of Linux Journal, I've been covering open source code development since 1996, contributing to its understanding and widespread adoption. For that and related work, I received a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for "Best Communicator" in 2005.
I helped reform both markets and marketing as a co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a business bestseller in 2000 that has since become part of the marketing canon. (As of today, Cluetrain is cited by more than 5300 other books.) I also coined Cluetrain's most-quoted line, "Markets are conversations."
I helped popularize blogging, a subject to which I have been contributing original thinking and writing since 1999. I also have more than 12,000 followers on Twitter.
EmanciPay is also my idea, and one I have been working on for some time. This includes collaboration with PRX and other members of the public radio community on ListenLog (the brainchild of Keith Hopper at NPR), which can be found today on the Public Radio Player, an iPhone app that has been downloaded more than 2 million times. I am also working on EmanciPay with students at MIT/CSAIL and Kings College London. The MIT/CSAIL collaboration is led by David Karger of the MIT faculty, and ties in with work he and students are doing with Haystack and Tipsy.
I've also contributed to other VRM development efforts — on identity and trust frameworks, on privacy assurance, on selective disclosure of personal data, and on personal data stores (PDSes), all of which will help support EmanciPay as it is deployed.
What terms best describe your project?:
Bold, original, practical, innovative and likely to succeed.
What tasks/benchmarks need to be accomplished to develop your project and by when will you complete them? (500 words)
1) Engaging of programmers at MIT and other institutions within two months.
2) Establishment of Customer Commons (similar to Creative Commons) within two months.
3) Getting EmanciPay into clinical law case study by classes at law schools, one semester after the grant money arrives.
4) Beta-level code within six months.
5) Recruitment of first-round participating media entities (journals, sites, blogs, broadcast stations — completed within six months.
6) Relationships established with PayPal, Google Checkout and other payment intermediators within six months.
7) Tipsy trials within three months after beta-level code is ready.
8) Full EmanciPay trials within six months after beta-level code is ready.
9) Research protocols completed by the time beta code is ready.
How will you measure progress?: (500 words)
1) Involvement in open source code development by programmers other than those already paid or engaged (for example, as students) for the work
2) Completion of code
3) Deployment in target software and devices
4) Cooperation by allied development .orgs and .coms
5) Adoption and use by individuals
6) Direct financial benefit for news organizations.
All are measurable. We can count programmers working on code bases, as well as patches and lines of code submitted and added. We can see completed code in downloadable and installable form in the appropriate places. We can see and document cooperation by organizations. We can count downloads and monitor activities by users (with their permission). And we can see measurable financial benefits to news and information organizations. Researching each of these will be part of the project. For example, we will need to provide on our website, or directly, descriptions of accounting methods for the organizations that will benefit directly from individual contributions.
Do you see any risk in the development of your project?: (500 words)
EmanciPay is likely to be seen as disruptive by organizations that are highly vested in existing forms of funding. One example is public broadcasting, which has relied on fund drives for decades.
There is also a fear that EmanciPay will raise the number of contributors while lowering the overall funding dollar amount spent by contributors. I don't expect that to happen. What I do expect is for the market to decide — and for EmanciPay to provide the means. Fortunately, EmanciPay also provides means for non-monetary relationships to grow as well, which will raise the perception of value by users and customers, and the likelihood that more users will become customers.
How will people learn about what you are doing?: (500 words) remaining
We will blog about it, talk about it at conferences, tweet about it, and use every other personal and social medium to spread the word. And we will use traditional media relations as well — which shouldn't be too hard, since we will be working to bring more income to those media.
We have a good story about an important cause. I'm good at communicating and driving stories forward, and I and have no doubt that the effort will succeed.
Is this a one-time experiment or do you think it will continue after the grant?: (500 words)
EmanciPay will continue after the grant because it will become institutionalized within the fabric of the economy, as will its allied efforts.
In addition to the Knight News Challenge, does your project rely on other revenue sources? (Choose all that apply):
[ ] Advertising
[ ] Paid Subscriptions
[ x ] Crowd-Funded
[ ] Earned Income
[ ] Syndication
[ ] Other
Here's what happened after that.
Customer Commons was incorporated as a California-based 501(3)(c) nonprofit shortly after this was submitted. (It is also currently cited in this CNN story and this one by Fox News.) Almost entirely bootstrapped, Customer Commons has established itself as a Creative Commons-like place where model personal privacy policies and terms of engagement that individuals proffer as first parties can live. Those terms are among a number of other tools for exercising citizen sovereign powers. "CuCo" also plans, immodestly, to be a worldwide membership organization, comprised entirely of customers (possible slogan: "We're the hundred percent"). In that capacity, it will hold events, publish, develop customer-side code that's good for both customers and businesses (e.g. a shopping cart of your own that you can take from site to site), and lobby for policies that respect the natural sovereignty and power of customers in the digital world. After years of prep, and not much asking, Customer Commons is at last ready to accept funding, and to start scaling up. If you have money to invest in grass roots citizen-sovereign work, that's a good place to do it.
Commercial publishers, including nearly all the world's websites (or so it seems) became deeply dependent on adtech—tracking based advertising—for income. (I reviewed that history here in 2015.) We've been fighting that. So have governments. Both the GDPR in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act were called to existence by privacy abuses funded by adtech. (Seriously, without adtech, those laws wouldn't have happened.)
The current VRM developments list is a large and growing one. So is our list of participants.
Some of the allied projects mentioned in the proposal are gone or have morphed. But some are still there, and there are many other potential collaborators.
Fintech has become a thing, along with blockchain, distributed ledgers and other person-driven solutions to the problem of excessive centralization.
The word cluetrain is now mentioned in more than 13,000 books. And, twenty years since it was first uttered, cluetrain is also tweeted almost constantly.
I am now editor-in-chief of Linux Journal, the first publication ready to accept terms proffered by readers, starting with a Customer Commons one dubbed #NoStalking.
That list could go on, but it's not what matters.
What matters is that EmanciPay was a great idea when we proposed it in the first place, and a better idea now. With the right backing, it can scale.
If you want to solve the problem of paying for news (or all of journalism), there is not a more democratic, fair, trust-causing and potentially massive idea on the table, for doing exactly that, than EmanciPay. Nor one better potentiated to address lots of other problems and goals laid out in that Knight Commission report. One example: An immodest proposal for the music industry.
If you're interested, talk to me.
Weighings
September 18, 2018 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment
A few years ago I got a Withings bathroom scale: one that knows it's me, records my weight, body mass index and fat percentage on a graph informed over wi-fi. The graph was in a Withings cloud.
I got it because I liked the product (still do, even though it now just tells me my weight and BMI), and because I trusted Withings, a French company subject to French privacy law, meaning it would store my data in a safe place accessible only to me, and not look inside. Or so I thought.
Here's the privacy policy, and here are the terms of use, both retrieved from Archive.org. (Same goes for the link in the last paragraph and the image above.)
Then, in 2016, the company was acquired by Nokia and morphed into Nokia Health. Sometime after that, I started to get these:
This told me Nokia Health was watching my weight, which I didn't like or appreciate. But I wasn't surprised, since Withings' original privacy policy featured the lack of assurance long customary to one-sided contracts of adhesion that have been pro forma on the Web since commercial activity exploded there in 1995: "The Service Provider reserves the right to modify all or part of the Service's Privacy Rules without notice. Use of the Service by the User constitutes full and complete acceptance of any changes made to these Privacy Rules." (The exact same language appears in the original terms of use.)
Still, I was too busy with other stuff to care more about it until I got this from community at email.health.nokia two days ago:
Here's the announcement at the "learn more" link. Sounded encouraging.
So I dug a bit and and saw that Nokia in May planned to sell its Health division to Withings co-founder Éric Carreel (@ecaeca).
Thinking that perhaps Withings would welcome some feedback from a customer, I wrote this in a customer service form:
One big reason I bought my Withings scale was to monitor my own weight, by myself. As I recall the promise from Withings was that my data would remain known only to me (though Withings would store it). Since then I have received many robotic emailings telling me my weight and offering encouragements. This annoys me, and I would like my data to be exclusively my own again — and for that to be among Withings' enticements to buy the company's products. Thank you.
Here's the response I got back, by email:
Thank you for contacting Nokia Customer Support about monitoring your own weight. I'll be glad to help.
Following your request to remove your email address from our mailing lists, and in accordance with data privacy laws, we have created an interface which allows our customers to manage their email preferences and easily opt-out from receiving emails from us. To access this interface, please follow the link below:
Obviously, the person there didn't understand what I said.
So I'm saying it here. And on Twitter.
What I'm hoping isn't for Withings to make a minor correction for one customer, but rather that Éric & Withings enter a dialog with the @VRM community and @CustomerCommons about a different approach to #GDPR compliance: one at the end of which Withings might pioneer agreeing to customers' friendly terms and conditions, such as those starting to appear at Customer Commons.
Customertech Will Turn the Online Marketplace Into a Marvel-Like Universe in Which All of Us are Enhanced
May 29, 2017 / Doc Searls / 4 Comments
We've been thinking too small.
Specifically, we've been thinking about data as if it ought to be something big, when it's just bits.
Your life in the networked world is no more about data than your body is about cells.
What matters most to us online is agency, not data. Agency is the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power (Merriam-Webster).
Nearly all the world's martech and adtech assumes we have no more agency in the marketplace than marketing provides us, which is kind of the way ranchers look at cattle. That's why bad marketers assume, without irony, that it's their sole responsibility to provide us with an "experience" on our "journey" down what they call a "funnel."
What can we do as humans online that isn't a grace of Apple, Amazon, Facebook or Google?
Marshall McLuhan says every new technology is "an extension of ourselves." Another of his tenets is "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." Thus Customertech—tools for customers—will inevitably enlarge our agency and change us in the process.
For example, with customertech, we can—
Make companies agree to our terms, rather than the other way around.
Control our own self-sovereign identities, and manage all the ways we are known to the administrative systems of the world. This means we will be able to—
Change our email or our home address in the records of every company we deal with, in one move.
Pay what we want, where we want, for whatever we want, in our own ways.
Call for service or support in one simple and straightforward way of our own, rather than in as many ways as there are 800 numbers to call and punch numbers into a phone before we wait on hold while bad music plays.
Express loyalty in our own ways, which are genuine rather than coerced.
Have an Internet of MY Things, which each of us controls for ourselves, and in which every thing we own has its own cloud, and we control as well.
Own and control all our health and fitness records, and how others use them.
Help companies by generously sharing helpful facts about how we use their products and services—but in our own ways, though our own standard tools that work the same for every company we deal with.
Plus lots more you'll see in the works here.
Compared to what we have in the offline world, these are superpowers. When customertech gives us these superpowers, the marketplace will become a Marvel-like universe filled with enhanced individuals. Trust me: this will be just as good for business as it will be for each of us.
We can't get there if all we're thinking about is data.
By the way, I made this same case to Mozilla in December 2015, on the last day I consulted the company that year. I did it through a talk called Giving Users Superpowers at an all-hands event called Mozlando. I don't normally use slides, but this time I did, leveraging the very slides Mozilla keynoters showed earlier, which I shot with my phone from the audience. Download the slide deck here, and be sure to view it with the speaker's notes showing. The advice I give in it is still good.
BTW, a big HT to @SeanBohan for the Superpowers angle, starting with the title (which he gave me) for the Mozlando talk.
Pictures Unpack 20,669 Words
March 16, 2017 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment
That's a small sample of some great work by the artist R. Siskoryak, who (Wikipedia tells us), usually "specializes in making comic adaptations of literature classics", but has now graphically adapted the complete text of what Joe Coscarelli (@JoeCoscarelli) of The New York Times (in Artist Helps iTunes' User Agreement Go Down Easy), calls "the complete text of Apple's mind-numbing corporate boilerplate" one must agree to before using iTunes.
The adaptation has its own Tumblr site, where it says, "@rsikoryak is on tour to promote the new color edition of Terms and Conditions: The Graphic Novel, out now from @drawnandquarterly." Hence the image above. His well-illustrated bio there is fun too. You can also read the original Tumblr version from the beginning here.
He'll be appearing (and, presumably speaking and showing) at the Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway, 10003, with Kenneth Goldsmith, at 7pm this evening (Thursday, March 9). He's already been in Baltimore. Next up:
Pittsburgh, PA, Friday, March 17, 2017 – 6:00pm, ToonSeum with Copacetic Comics. 945 Liberty Ave, 15222
Cincinnati, OH, Tuesday, March 21, 2017 – 7:00pm, Joseph-Beth Booksellers, 2692 Madison Ave., 45208 with Carol Tyler
New York, NY, Friday, March 24, 2017 – 4:00pm, Spring Symposium, Cardozo Law Journal, moderated by Brett Frischmann
Rochester, NY, Wednesday, April 12, 2017 – 4:00pm, Rochester Institute of Technology, Bamboo Room in the Student Alumni Union, 1 Lomb Memorial Dr, 14623
Toronto, ON, Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Friday, May 12, 2017 – 9:00am to Sunday, May 14, 2017 – 5:00pm, Toronto Reference Library, 789 Yonge
Meanwhile, here are a few things we've been doing (both through ProjectVRM and CustomerCommons, which is working with the Consent & Information Sharing Working Group at Kantara) on terms and conditions you, the individual formerly known as "the user" (as if you're on drugs) can assert as the first party. In other words, ways companies such as Apple can click "agree" to what you bring to the level table between you both. Four reasons they would do that:
We have the Internet now. It's a flat place. We don't need to drag industrial age defaults that give companies scale across many customers, but don't give individuals scale across many companies.
Ours can have scale too. This is what Cluetrain promised in 1999 when it said we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. Sure, companies haven't heard of customer boilerplate before; but they do like consistency, simplicity, predictability, standardization and saving money and time. Customers' scalable terms will bring them all.
Our terms can be as friendly online as they are off. First example: #NoStalking, which can save the asses of publishers and advertisers, and maybe save journalism too.
GDPR compliance. No need to worry about Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation and its scary penalties when agreeing to friendly GDPR-compliant terms proffered by individuals obviates the whole thing.
Bonus links:
EmanciTerm (An early brand-like name we came up with for a term an individual might assert. The two below are examples.)
#NoStalking, which we explain in How customers can debug business with one line of code (19 April 2016 here, and in Medium), and in Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers (11 May 2016 here, and in Medium). Here is the current draft of the term itself.
#Intentcasting, which we have visited in many posts here. Here is the current draft for some intentcasting terms.
We will also be visiting all of these—on both the first and second party sides—at VRM Day, and then at the 24th Internet Identity Workshop, which happen together the first week of May at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.
VRM Day: Starting Phase Two
October 17, 2016 / Doc Searls / Comments Off on VRM Day: Starting Phase Two
VRM Day is today, 24 October, at the Computer History Museum. IIW follows, over the next three days at the same place. (The original version of this post was October 17.)
We've been doing VRM Days since (let's see…) this one in 2013, and VRM events since this one in 2007. Coming on our tenth anniversary, this is our last in Phase One.
The difference between Phase One and Phase Two is that between rocks and snowballs. In Phase One we played Sisyphus, pushing a rock uphill. In Phase Two we roll snowballs downhill.
Phase One was about getting us to the point where VRM was accepted by many as a thing bound to happen. This has taken ten years, but we are there.
Phase Two is about making it happen, by betting our energies on ideas and work that starts rolling downhill and gaining size and momentum.
Some of that work is already rolling. Some is poised to start. Both kinds will be on the table at VRM Day. Here are ones currently on the agenda:
VRM + CRM via JLINC. See At last: a protocol to link VRM and CRM. , and The new frontier for CRM is CDL: customer driven leads. This is a one form of intentcasting that should be enormously appealing to CRM companies and their B2B corporate customers. Speaking of which, we also have—
Big companies welcoming VRM. Leading this is Fing, a French think tank that brings together many of the country's largest companies, both to welcome VRM and to research (e.g. through Mesinfos) how the future might play out. Sarah Medjek of Fing will present that work, and lead discussion of where it will head next. We will also get a chance to participate in that research by providing her with our own use cases for VRM. (We'll take out a few minutes to each fill out an online form.)
Terms individuals assert in dealings with companies. These are required for countless purposes. Mary Hodder will lead discussion of terms currently being developed at Customer Commons and the CISWG / Kantara User Submitted Terms working group (Consent and Information Sharing Working Group). Among other things, this leads to—
Next steps in tracking protection and ad blocking. At the last VRM Day and IIW, we discussed CHEDDAR on the server side and #NoStalking on the individual's side. There are now huge opportunities with both, especially if we can normalize #NoStalking terms for all tracking protection and ad blocking tools. To prep for this, see Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers, where you'll find the image on the right, copied from the whiteboard on VRM Day.
Blockchain, Identity and VRM. Read what Phil Windley has been writing lately distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) and what they bring to the identity discussions that have been happening for 22 IIWs, so far. There are many relevancies to VRM.
Personal data. This was the main topic at two recent big events in Europe: MyData2016 in Helsinki and PIE (peronal information economy) 2016 in London. The long-standing anchor for discussions and work on the topic at VRM Day and IIW is PDEC (Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium). Dean Landsman of PDEC will keep that conversational ball rolling. Adrian Gropper will also brief us on recent developments around personal health data as well.
Hacks on the financial system. Kevin Cox can't make it, but wants me to share what he would have presented. Three links: 1) a one minute video that shows why the financial system is so expensive, 2) part of a blog post respecting his local Water Authority and newly elected government., and 3) an explanation of the idea of how we can build low-cost systems of interacting agents. He adds, "Note the progression from location, to address, to identity, to money, to housing. They are all 'the same'." We will also look at how small business and individuals have more in common than either do with big business. With a hint toward that, see what Xero (the very hot small business accounting software company) says here.
What ProjectVRM becomes. We've been a Berkman-Klein Center project from the start. We've already spun off Customer Commons. Inevitably, ProjectVRM will itself be spun off, or evolve in some TBD way. We need to co-think and co-plan how that will go. It will certainly live on in the DNA of VRM and VRooMy work of many kinds. How and where it lives on organizationally is an open question we'll need to answer.
Here is a straw man context for all of those and more.
Top Level: Tools for people. These are ones which, in legal terms, give individuals power as first parties. In mathematical terms, they make us independent variables, rather than dependent ones. Our focus from the start has been independence and engagement.
VRM in the literal sense: whatever engages companies' CRM or equivalent systems.
Intentcasting.
PIMS—Personal Information Management Systems. Goes by many names: personal clouds, personal data stores, life management platforms and so on. Ctrl-Shift has done a good job of branding PIMS, however. We should all just go with that.
Privacy tools. Such as those provided by tracking protection (and tracking-protective ad blocking).
Legal tools. Such as the terms Customer Commons and the CISWG are working on.
UI elements. Such as the r-button.
Transaction & payment systems. Such as EmanciPay.
Those overlap to some degree. For example, a PIMS app and data store can do all that stuff. But we do need to pull the concerns and categories apart as much as we can, just so we can talk about them.
Kaliya will facilitate VRM Day. She and I are still working on the agenda. Let us know what you'd like to add to the list above, and we'll do what we can. (At IIW, you'll do it, because it's an unconference. That's where all the topics are provided by participants.)
Again, register here. And see you there.
We're done with Phase One
October 9, 2016 / Doc Searls / Comments Off on We're done with Phase One
Here's a picture that's worth more than a thousand words:
He's with MAIF, the French insurance company, speaking at MyData 2016 in Helsinki, a little over a month ago. Here's another:
That's Sean Bohan, head of our steering committee, expanding on what many people at the conference already knew.
I was there too, giving the morning keynote on Day 2:
It was an entirely new talk. Pretty good one too, especially since I came up with it the night before.
See, by the end of Day 1, it was clear that pretty much everybody at the conference already knew how market power was shifting from centralized industries to distributed individuals and groups (including many inside centralized industries). It was also clear that most of the hundreds of people at the conference were also familiar with VRM as a market category. I didn't need to talk about that stuff any more. At least not in Europe, where most of the VRM action is.
So, after a very long journey, we're finally getting started.
In my own case, the journey began when I saw the Internet coming, back in the '80s. It was clear to me that the Net would change the world radically, once it allowed commercial activity to flow over its pipes. That floodgate opened on April 30, 1995. Not long after that, I joined the fray as an editor for Linux Journal (where I still am, by the way, more than 20 years later). Then, in 1999, I co-wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which delivered this "one clue" above its list of 95 Theses:
And then, one decade ago last month, I started ProjectVRM, because that clue wasn't yet true. Our reach did not exceed the grasp of marketers in the world. If anything, the Net extended marketers' grasp a lot more than it did ours. (Shoshana Zuboff says their grasp has metastacized into surveillance capitalism. ) In respect to Gibson's Law, Cluetrain proclaimed an arrived future that was not yet distributed. Our job was to distribute it.
Which we have. And we can start to see results such as those above. So let's call Phase One a done thing. And start thinking about Phase Two, whatever it will be.
To get that work rolling, here are a few summary facts about ProjectVRM and related efforts.
First, the project itself could hardly be more lightweight, at least administratively. It consists of:
A mailing list with more than 600 members
A wiki with a lot of stuff in it, including concepts that are now starting to play out in different ways. In addition to VRM itself, these include intentcasting, EmanciPay and the r-button.
Gatherings twice a year at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. These are VRM Day and the Internet Identity Workshop, or IIW. (The next ones are coming up later this month. You're all invited.)
Second, we have a spin-off: Customer Commons, which will do for personal terms of engagement (one each of us can assert online) what Creative Commons (another Berkman-Klein spinoff) did for copyright.
Third, we have a list of many dozens of developers, which seem to be concentrated in Europe and Australia/New Zealand. Two reasons for that, both speculative:
Privacy. The concept is much more highly sensitive and evolved in Europe than in the U.S. The reason we most often get goes, "Some of our governments once kept detailed records of people, and those records were used to track down and kill many of them." There are also more evolved laws respecting privacy. In Australia there have been privacy laws for several years requiring those collecting data about individuals to make it available to them, in forms the individual specifies. And in Europe there is the General Data Protection Regulation, which will impose severe penalties for unwelcome data gathering from individuals, starting in 2018.
Enlightened investment. Meaning investors who want a startup to make a positive difference in the world, and not just give them a unicorn to ride out some exit. (Which seems to have become the default model in the U.S., especially Silicon Valley.)
What we lack is research. And by we I mean the world, and not just ProjectVRM.
Research is normally the first duty of a project at the Berkman Klein Center, which is chartered as a research organization. Research was ProjectVRM's last duty, however, because we had nothing to research at first. Or, frankly, until now. That's why we were defined as a development & research project rather than the reverse.
Where and how research on VRM and related efforts happens is a wide open question. What matters is that it needs to be done, starting soon, while the "before" state still prevails in most of the world, and the future is still on its way in delivery trucks. Who does that research matters far less than the research itself.
So we are poised at a transitional point now. Let the conversations about Phase Two commence.
The Castle Doctrine
June 19, 2016 / Doc Searls / 3 Comments
The Castle doctrine has been around a long time. Cicero (106–43 BCE) wrote, "What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man's own home?" In Book 4, Chapter 16 of his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone (1723–1780 CE) added, "And the law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man's house, that it stiles it his castle, and will never suffer it to be violated with impunity: agreeing herein with the sentiments of ancient Rome…"
Since you're reading this online, let me ask, what's your house here? What sacred space do you strongly guard, and never suffer to be violated with impunity?
At the very least, it should be your browser.
But, unless you're running tracking protection in the browser you're using right now, companies you've never heard of (and some you have) are watching you read this, and eager to use or sell personal data about you, so you can be delivered the human behavior hack called "interest based advertising."
Shoshana Zuboff, of Harvard Business School, has a term for this:surveillance capitalism, defined as "a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior."
Almost across the board, advertising-supported publishers have handed their business over to adtech, the surveillance-based (they call it "interactive") wing of advertising. Adtech doesn't see your browser as a sacred personal space, but instead as a shopping cart with ad space that you push around from site to site.
So here is a helpful fact: we don't go anywhere when we use our browsers. Our browser homes are in our computers, laptops and mobile devices. When we "visit" a web page or site with our browsers, we actually just request its contents (using the hypertext protocol called http or https).
In no case do we consciously ask to be spied on, or abused by content we didn't ask for or expect. That's why we have every right to field-strip out anything we don't want when it arrives at our browsers' doors.
The castle doctrine is what hundreds of millions of us practice when we use tracking protection and ad blockers. It is what called the new Brave browser into the marketplace. It's why Mozilla has been cranking up privacy protections with every new version of Firefox . It's why Apple's new content blocking feature treats adtech the way chemo treats cancer. It's why respectful publishers will comply with CHEDDAR. It's why Customer Commons is becoming the place to choose No Trespassing signs potential intruders will obey. And it's why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers.
The job of every entity I named in the last paragraph — and every other one in a position to improve personal privacy online — is to bring as much respect to the castle doctrine in the virtual world as we've had in the physical one for more than two thousand years.
It should help to remember that it's still early. We've only had commercial activity on the Internet since April 1995. But we've also waited long enough. Let's finish making our homes online the safe places they should have been in the first place.
How customers can debug business with one line of code
April 19, 2016 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment
Four years ago, I posted An olive branch to advertising here. It began,
Online advertising has a couple of big problems that could possibly be turned into opportunities. One is Do Not Track, or DNT. The other is blocking of ads and/or tracking.
Publishers and the advertising business either attacked or ignored Do Not Track, which was too bad, because the ideas we had for making it work might have prevented the problem those businesses now have with ad blocking.
According to the latest PageFair/Adobe study, the number of people blocking ads passed 200 million last May, with double-digit increases in adoption, worldwide. Tracking protection is also gaining in popularity.
While those solutions provide individuals with agency and scale, they don't work for publishers. Not yet, anyway.
What we need is a solution that scales for readers and is friendly to publishers and the kind of advertising readers can welcome—or at least tolerate, in appreciation of how ads sponsor the content they want. This is what we have always had with newspapers, magazines, radio and TV in the offline world, none of which ever tracked anybody anywhere.
So now we offer a solution. It's a simple preference, which readers can express in code, that says this: Just show me ads that aren't based on tracking me. Equally simple code can sit on the publishers' side. Digital handshakes can also happen between the two.
This term will live at Customer Commons, which was designed for that purpose, on the model of Creative Commons (which also came out of work done by folks here at the Berkman Center). This blog post provides some context.
We'll be working on that term, its wording , and the code that expresses and agrees to it, next week at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Monday will be VRM Day. Tuesday through Thursday will be IIW—the Internet Identity Workshop (where ProjectVRM was incubated almost ten years ago). VRM Day is mostly for planning the work we'll do at IIW. VRM Day is free, and IIW is cheap for three days of actually getting stuff done. (It's by far the most leveraged conference I know, partly because it's an unconference: no keynotes, panels or sponsor booths. Just breakouts that participants create, choose and lead.)
If you care about aligning publishing and advertising online with what worked for hundreds of years offline — and driving uninvited surveillance out of business itself — come help us out.
This one term is a first step. There will be many more before we customers get the full respect we deserve from ad-funded businesses online. Each step needs to prove to one business category or another that customers aren't just followers. Sometimes they need to take the lead.
This is one of those times. So let's make it happen.
See you next week.
Let's scale #intentcasting
November 14, 2015 / Doc Searls / 8 Comments
Scale for customers means being able to issue signals to whole markets in one move.
Imagine, for example, calling for a ride, and getting it from whatever service might be listening. Could be Uber, Lyft, a car service, a taxi company or a private individual. You should be able to do this anonymously until you're ready to do business, and then disclose just what the other party needs to know.
Imagine being able to change your address, phone number or last name with all the companies you deal with, again in one move.
This is do-able. But it can't be done unless it is approached from the customers' side. This customer-side approach defines VRM.
Toward that, there is lots of development work going on. On the ProjectVRM wiki we list many dozens of development projects, including 22 startups in the Intelligent Personal Assistant and intentcasting categories ("†" signifies a commercial effort):
Intelligent Personal Assistants
iNeed † "Your own personal assistant."
MyWave † "'Frank' puts the customer in control of "getting personalised experiences anytime, anywhere, on any device."
Intentcasting
Note: Intelligent Personal Assistants, above, by nature also do intentcasting.
About2Buy † "A Collaborative Commerce System to Align Internet Buyers & Sellers Via Multiple Channels of Social Distribution."
Crowdspending † "… gives each of us the power of all of us."
GetHuman † "Need to contact a company? Or have them call you? Get customer service faster and easier."
Greentoe † "Finally…There's a New Way to Shop! Name Your Price & We Negotiate For You."
HireRush † "Connecting people who are looking for work and locals who need to hire trusted professionals."
HomeAdvisor † "We help you find trusted home improvement pros."
Indie Dash Button "This … turns traditional advertising on its head, and removes the need for complicated targeting technology. Customers readily identify themselves, creating more valuable sales channels where guesswork is all but eliminated."
Intently † "Request any service anywhere with Intently.co."
Instacart † "The best way to shop for groceries — Delivered from the stores you love in one hour"
Magic † "Text this phone number to get whatever you want on demand with no hassle…"
Mesh † "Connect with only the things you love… See ads from brands that matter to you. And block the ones that don't."
MyTime † "Book appointments for anything."
Nifti † – Intentcasting "puts" in the market at customer (or community-) -chosen prices
Pikaba † "Pikaba is Social Shopping Platform that captures consumer intent to purchase and connects them with the right local business."
PricePatrol † "monitors nearby stores for what you want at the price you want"
RedBeacon † "Trusted pros for a better home."
TaskRabbit † "Tell us what you need, let us know what we can take off your plate, choose a Tasker, hire one of our fully vetted Taskers to get the job done."
Thumbtack † "We help you hire experienced professionals at a price that's right."
TrackIf † "Track your favorite sites for sales, new items, back-in-stock, and more."
WebOfNeeds – "A distributed marketplace driven by customer needs."
yellCast † "What you want, where you want it."
Zaarly † "Hire local, hand-picked home services. We moderate every job and guarantee happiness at virtually any cost."
But so far only two projects on those lists — the Indie Dash Button — and WebOfNeeds — give people (and companies helping them, such as those on the two lists) an open source way to scale across multiple vendors with the same signaling method. (I am sure there are more. If you know some, or want us to correct this list, please let us know and we'll make the changes.)
Talk about intentcasting has increased lately, thanks to the need for better signaling from demand to supply at a time when more than 200 million souls are blocking ads, and there is a growing sense that this is a crisis for advertisers and publishers that's too good to waste —and that the best either of those parties can do is a better job of listening for signals from the marketplace that are beyond their control but will do them some good. Intentcasting is one of those signals.
Intentcasting is a good signal because it's friendly and comes from either new customers wanting to spend or existing customers wanting to relate (for example, to obtain services). In the former case it fits nicely into the existing need (and programmatic interfaces for) lead generation. In the latter case it speaks straight to call centers. What matters most is that both come voluntarily and straight from prospective or actual customers.
I'm wondering if there is a semantic-ish approach to Intentcasting. By that I mean a vernacular of abbreviated simple statements of what one is looking for. Example: "2br 2ba apt 10019" means a two bedroom and two bath apartment in the 10019 zip code.
Again, what matters most here is that these signals need to be issued to the marketplace outside of the silo system that currently comprises way too much of the business world. I know the IndieWeb folks have worked on something like this. (Theirs is the Indie Dash Button, mentioned above).
And I know there are already bitcoin/blockchain appraoches too. For eample, @MrChrisEllis's ProTip, which facilitates Bitcoin payments in a nearly frictionless way. There are the broad outlines of possibility in both EmanciTerm and EmanciPay, which are design models we've had for years. (ProTip is an example of the latter.)
We could also use a good generic symbol for intent. I don't know of one, or it would have made the cover of The Intention Economy. The star photo above is the best I could come up with for a visual to go with this post. But the lazyweb should do better than that.
Whatever we come up with, the time could hardly be more right.
[This post was impelled by the need to enlarge on my comment under Move Over, Doc Searls: It's Time For A New Intention Economy by Kaila Colbin (@kcolbin) in MediaPost. Thanks, Kaila, for getting me going. :-)]
VRM Day: Let's talk UMA and terms
August 29, 2015 / Doc Searls / 3 Comments
VRM Day and IIW are coming up in October: VRM Day on the 26th, and IIW on the 27th-29th. As always, both are at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. Also, as always, we would like to focus VRM day on issues that will be discussed and pushed forward (by word and code) on the following days at IIW.
I see two.
The first is UMA, for User Managed Access. UMA is the brainchild of Eve Maler, one of the most creative minds in the Digital Identity field. (And possibly its best singer as well.) The site explains, "User-Managed Access (UMA) is an award-winning OAuth-based protocol designed to give a web user a unified control point for authorizing who and what can get access to their online personal data, content, and services, no matter where all those things live on the web. Read the spec, join the group, check out the implementations, follow us on Twitter, like us onFacebook, get involved!"
Which a number of us in the #VRM community already are — enough, in fact, to lead discussion on VRM Day.
In Regaining Control of Our Data with User-Managed Access, Phil Windley calls VRM "a perfect example of the kind of place where UMA could have a big impact. VRM is giving customers tools for managing their interactions with vendors. That sounds, in large part, like a permissioning task. And UMA could be a key piece of technology for unifying various VRM efforts."
For example, "Most of us hate seeing ads getting in the way of what we're trying to do online. The problem is that even with the best "targeting" technology, most of the ads you see are wasted. You don't want to see them. UMA could be used to send much stronger signals to vendors by granting permission for them to access information would let them help me and, in the process, make more money."
We call those signals "intentcasting."
Yet, even though our wiki lists almost two dozen intentcasting developers, all of them roll their own code. As a result, all of them have limited success. This argues for looking at UMA as one way they can substantiate the category together.
A large amount of activity is going into UMA and health care, which is perhaps the biggest VRM "vertical." (Since it involves all of us, and what matters most to our being active on the planet.)
The second topic is terms. These can take two forms: ones individuals can assert (which on the wiki we call EmanciTerm); and truly user- and customer-friendly ones sites and services can assert. (Along with truly agreeable privacy policies on both sides.)
At last Fall's VRM Day, we came up with one possible approach, which looked like this on the whiteboard:
This was posted on Customer Commons, which is designed to serve the same purpose for individual terms as Creative Commons does for individual artists' copyright terms. We can do the same this time.
Lately Meeco has come out with terms individuals can set. And there are others in the works as well. (One in particular will be of special interest, but it's not public yet. I expect it will be, by VRM Day.)
So be sure to register soon. Space is limited.
Bonus links/tweets: here and here.
People are the real edge
We're not data. We're digital. Let's research that.
What law might clear the way for VRM development?
On privacy fundamentalism
VRM is Me2B
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Dollar in running at Liberty?
Washington assistant Cameron Dollar is reportedly in the mix to be the new head coach at Liberty, according to this story from the Lynchburg New & Advance.
Another interesting name on that list is former UW assistant Ritchie McKay, most recently the head coach at New Mexico.
Dollar, 31, has been an assistant at UW for all five of Lorenzo Romar's years as head coach. He was also with Romar for all three of Romar's seasons at Saint Louis. Dollar is considered a top-notch recruiter and works with UW's guards.
Here is some information on Liberty University, which is located in Lynchburg, Va. It's a Division I school that plays in the Big South Conference.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on Liberty, pointing out that it was founded by Jerry Falwell in 1971.
Liberty fired coach Randy Dunton last month — you can find details on that here.
Dollar has often expressed his interest in being a D-I head coach, though only if the opportunity is right. Here's a column from Steve Kelley on Dollar and his aspirations last March.


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Southern Gaming Summit Announces Keynote Speakers
by admin | Feb 23, 2018 | News Items
American Gaming Association's Geoff Freeman will open conference, and Mississippi Choctaw Chief Phyliss Anderson will speak at the lunch
FEBRUARY 23, 2018… The Mississippi Gaming & Hospitality Association (MGHA) today announced that it has confirmed two important keynote speakers for the Southern Gaming Summit, May 2-3, along the beautiful Mississippi Gulf Coast. Opening the SGS conference following a breakfast at the Beau Rivage on May 3 will be American Gaming Association President & CEO Geoff Freeman. Later that day, highlighting the business luncheon (sponsored by Global Gaming Women) will be Phyliss Anderson, the Tribal Chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
"We're excited to present these two dynamic speakers at this year's Southern Gaming Summit," said Larry Gregory, the executive director of the MGHA. "Geoff Freeman will bring his message of legal sports betting and industry unity to the show, and Chief Anderson will highlight the importance of the tribal government gaming segment of the southern gaming industry. These two speakers once again illustrate the importance of the Southern Gaming Summit to the U.S. gaming business."
Phyliss Gilland, the president of Global Gaming Women, says Chief Anderson is the perfect speaker for the GGW sponsored lunch, which is open to all.
"We are honored to have Chief Anderson speak at the Global Gaming Women luncheon at the Southern Gaming Summit," said Gilland. "Chief Anderson has achieved much in her career, and with her success is a role model for women and men in both the tribal and commercial sectors of the gaming industry."
The mission of Global Gaming Women (GGW) is to support the development and success of women in the international gaming industry through education, mentorship and networking opportunities. GGW brings together women from all segments of gaming in an effort to enrich their professional and personal lives.
In his role as chief executive of the AGA, Geoff Freeman is the leading advocate for the commercial and tribal gaming industry and is responsible for positioning the association to address regulatory, political and educational challenges and opportunities.
Prior to joining the AGA, Freeman was chief operating officer and executive vice president for the U.S. Travel Association, the nation's leading voice for increasing travel to and within the United States. Under his strategic leadership, the travel industry enacted the Travel Promotion Act, derailed an assault on corporate meetings and events, and began the march to building an army of one million employee activists. During his tenure, U.S. Travel doubled its resources.
Phyliss J. Anderson, a native of the Red Water community, serves her people as tribal chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Chief Anderson was officially sworn in as the first woman chief in Choctaw history during an inauguration ceremony on October 4, 2011. She is currently serving her second term in office.
Chief Anderson, fluent in the Choctaw language, has more than 30 years of experience with tribal government management. In 2003, she was elected to serve as a tribal council representative for her home community. While seated as a representative she served in the position of secretary-treasurer for the tribe. Over the years she has shown a strong commitment to financial responsibility; operating an accountable and transparent government; and building the quality of life on the reservation.
Southern Gaming Summit is the most important regional conference in the gaming industry, covering gaming in the South, the Midwest, the Rockies and the Mid-Atlantic states. Southern Gaming Summit is owned by the Mississippi Gaming & Hospitality Association, the organization representing 28 casino resorts in Mississippi. SGS is being managed by Casino Connection International, the parent company of Global Gaming Business magazine, the leading trade publication for the casino industry. For more information on SGS, visit the website at www.sgsummit.com or contact Larry Gregory at lgregory@msgaming.org, Roger Gros at rgros@ggbmagazine.com.
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© 2018 Mississippi Gaming & Hospitality Association


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Monjack on CNN's 'Larry King Live.'; Credit: CNN
Brittany Murphy's Husband Found Dead
Dennis Romero May 24, 2010
Late actress Brittany Murphy's husband was found dead over the weekend by her mother in what a coroner's official described preliminarily as a natural death.
The 40-year-old screenwriter, Simon Monjack, was found dead at the home he had shared with Murphy in the 1800 block of Rising Glen Road in the Hollywood Hills shortly before 9:30 p.m. Sunday. The discovery happened about five months after Murphy's mother found her daughter dead in the same home.
Although prescription drugs were found in the residence, county coroner's Assistant Chief Ed Winter said Monjack appeared to have died from natural causes. The cause of Murphy's death was pneumonia complicated, in part, by drug intoxication.
Rumors abounded that Monjack was a bad influence on Murphy, particularly when it came to the pair's alleged drug use. Now it seems the truth might not ever be known.
-With reporting from City News Service. Got news? Email us.


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How to Endow a Scholarship to Honor a Veteran
Ask Kim
You may be able to set up a scholarship fund through a college or community foundation, or support educational programs through a charity that specializes in helping veterans.
By Kimberly Lankford, Contributing Editor
My uncle was a navigator on a B-29 in World War II. He died a few years ago, and I'd like to set up a scholarship in his name to help students who want to study engineering. How do I do this?
See Also: 11 Top Sources of College Scholarships
A scholarship is a great way to remember your uncle and help students with their education expenses. You usually need about $20,000 to $25,000 to endow a scholarship that pays out $1,000 every year. You can take a charitable deduction for the money you give to a college, community foundation or other eligible charity.
The development office at a school or community foundation will help you set up the scholarship. You may want to focus on students who live in your uncle's hometown or those who plan to go into aviation or a specific type of engineering, for example. The organization can help you determine the requirements to impose without making the applicant pool too small.
The amount of money you need varies by organization. Some let you create a shorter-term scholarship fund with less money. San Diego State University, for example, requires $50,000 to endow a $2,000 annual scholarship, or you can commit to giving $5,000 a year over three years to finance three $5,000 scholarships.
The organization may help you create a fund even if you don't have enough money to endow an annual scholarship. Rather than paying for college tuition, for example, your gift could pay for students to attend a study-abroad program or educational camp.
A community foundation can help you set up a scholarship that isn't tied to a particular school -- helping local students who are interested in studying engineering at any college, for example. See the Community Foundation Locator to find one in your area. Look for one with experience managing scholarships.
Ask how the scholarship will be advertised, how the recipient will be selected and if there are any fees. Find out how involved you can be; you may be able to sit on the selection committee but not be the main decision maker, for example.
You may also be able to set up a scholarship fund or support educational programs through a charity that specializes in helping veterans and their families. Check out the charity first; some are much more effective than others. See Charity Navigator's list of highly rated charities to support veterans and active duty service members. Also see CharityWatch's Donor's Guide to Serving the Needs of Veterans and the Military. You can also search for charities and learn more about their finances and ratings at Give.org and Guidestar.org.
Another option is to donate to a military emergency relief fund that provides financial support for service members and their families and often helps with educational expenses, too. Army Emergency Relief, for example, provides scholarships to military spouses and children, in addition to other financial assistance. Each branch of the military has an emergency relief fund or aid society (see the Air Force Aid Society, the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society, and Coast Guard Mutual Assistance to find out more about making a donation in memory of your uncle).
Ask the school, charity or community foundation what types of assets you can give and how it will invest the money. You can give cash, appreciated stock or other investments to create the scholarship fund. A retirement-account required minimum distribution for people over age 70½ is another source of money. You can transfer up to $100,000 tax-free from an IRA to charity every year, which counts as the RMD but isn't included in your adjusted gross income. (See How to Ensure Your IRA Donation to Charity Is Tax-Free for more information.)
See Also: 10 Best Financial Benefits for Military Families
Got a question? Ask Kim at askkim@kiplinger.com.


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World Bank Approves $961m Support For Nigeria
in Breaking News, International News, Recent News
The World Bank has approved two Programme-for-Results operations totalling $961m to support Nigeria's federal and state governments in their effort to foster inclusion and revive growth, in alignment with the Economic Recovery and Growth Plan of the Federal Government of Nigeria for 2017–2020.
The Better Education Service Delivery for All Programme-for-Results is a $611m credit aiming to bring out-of-school children into the classroom, improve literacy, and strengthen accountability for results in basic education.
In 2013, at least 13 million school-age children were out of school, the majority of which is in the North where out-of-school children rates are also higher among girls, in rural areas and from poor families, the financial institution noted.
It said further that the Kaduna State Economic Transformation Programme for Results, a $350m credit, focused on enhancing private sector investment in Kaduna State through improved business environment, effective budget planning and execution and fiscal accountability.
According to a statement issued on Wednesday by the World Bank, Kaduna has taken a number of reform actions to improve its economic performance and social outcomes and sustain this reform effort.
"Investing in human capital and creating economic opportunities for all are key areas of focus to achieve more inclusive and private-sector led growth. These two operations support the Government's economic and growth recovery plan and will help Nigeria achieve sustainable and measurable results," World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Rachid Benmessaoud, said.
The bank added that both operations would make use of results-based financing, whereby disbursement of funds is linked to the achievement of tangible, verifiable results.
"As a first phase for addressing out-of-school children in Nigeria, BESDA aims to help enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the federal Universal Basic Education Programme through incentivising results at the state level and thereby reduce the number of out-of-school children by roughly one-third by 2022.
"The Kaduna operation will support the state's ambitious reform efforts to increase both private investments for job creation and revenue generation. It will also strengthen budget performance and fiscal accountability through citizen engagement," it said.
Tags: LoanNigeriaWorld
Britain's Prince Philip Hospitalised With Infection
Ondo State Police Parade Father, Son, Six Others Suspected Killers Of APC Chieftain


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