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Kim Cameron posted a busy person’s summary of the Laws of Identity and invited comments. Here is my version.

The Laws of Identity are fulfilled when …

• Individuals using computers can be in control of the information they give out about themselves.
• Individuals can give out just the information needed for the purpose at hand, and only to those who need it.
• 3rd parties can not link up all the ways individuals have used the Internet. For example, an individual always using a single identifier would be a big mistake.
• Individuals can choose who provides their identity information to whom and for what purpose.
• Individuals can understand how the identity system works and are able to make rational decisions and protect ourselves.
• Individuals can operate the identity system with a universally consistent, comprehensible user experience even though behind the scenes, different technologies, identifiers and identity providers are being used.

Kim Cameron posted a busy person’s summary of the Laws of Identity and invited comments. Here is my version.

The Laws of Identity are fulfilled when …

• Individuals using computers can be in control of the information they give out about themselves.
• Individuals can give out just the information needed for the purpose at hand, and only to those who need it.
• 3rd parties can not link up all the ways individuals have used the Internet. For example, an individual always using a single identifier would be a big mistake.
• Individuals can choose who provides their identity information to whom and for what purpose.
• Individuals can understand how the identity system works and are able to make rational decisions and protect ourselves.
• Individuals can operate the identity system with a universally consistent, comprehensible user experience even though behind the scenes, different technologies, identifiers and identity providers are being used.

I am studying at the moment and would like to see an increase in the consistent engagement level demanded of me during the 14 or so weeks of the semester. At the same time, I would like to see this done in a way that doesn’t impact on the instructor’s time. Here is a suggestion:

Student Sourcing Multiple Choice Questions Weekly Activity
This weekly activity could count for (say) 10% of the student’s total score.

Each week, students

1. use a small web application to develop and enter a week-specific multiple choice question with four answers to a bank of student created questions for this subject and
2. answer two questions that other students have entered.

When a student creates a question, they must give the text/ web reference that justifies their answer.

A student league table is maintained by the application showing a score calculated as:

• +2 for each question authored and submitted before the end of the relevant week.
• +1 for each question that the student answers correctly,

Quality is maintained through a challenge process. When answering questions entered by someone else, a student may believe that the question is off-topic or just wrong, if so, they may challenge the question. A challenge is resolved by the instructor. A successful challenger is given two points from the question’s author’s tally and the question is removed from the question bank. In order to discourage frivolous challenges, an unsuccessful challenger gives up three points to the author who was proved correct and the question is marked as “validated” to prevent further futile challenges.

If this, or something similar, had been in place for my current subject - I would be much better prepared for my exam today!

Good to be blogging again after a three month hiatus.

The Work Breakdown Structure has caught my attention. The work breakdown structure is foundational to project management. My insight today is that the WBS could also be foundation to a task management tool. The beauty of the WBS is the way that it assists in enumerating ALL the work and ONLY the work involved in a project - this idea is a way to leverage this ability in a lightweight way with an easy migration to a sophisticated PM tool.

I imagine a WBS creation tool like Freemind with its fluid and fast interface. The leaves of the tree are work packages which naturally degenerate to tasks.

For simple projects, one view of the WBS would present only the leaves of the tree (ie only the tasks) as a reorderable list. Tasks could then be assigned to a day and checked off when done like other task managers.

When the task view is not powerful enough the tool would allow the full power of a Project Management (PM) tool like openproj to be applied to the same WBS and work packages/ tasks.

If dependences between parts of the WBS are added using the PM tool then the task view would show the tasks in clusters based on the dependencies.

When I was at university getting from class to class between buildings meant fighting your way along a footpath against a flow of students coming the opposite direction. Solutions? You could widen the path (more concrete) or redesign the pathway using a similar width of concrete split into two paths, one for each direction.

Here is an illustration:

There is no need for signs. People will naturally walk taking the most direct path towards their goal. In this way, the two paths end up being effectively one way. In addition, the area between the two paths may be grassed and treed.

The result - no additional concrete and no signs - and no dodging oncoming traffic!

This design occurred to me in 1982 or ‘83 and it has only taken me 24 years to get it written down. If anyone has seen this idea implemented anywhere - I would love to see pictures. Leave a comment.

If all our building’s internal walls, signage as well as dynamic displays where flat panel displays what would happen?

I was walking through a mall a few days ago and realised that pretty much all that I could see around me could be displayed on flat panels like those in Minority Report. There are many consequences of this, (including the paint industry taking a bit of a battering), but in this post I would like to highlight one.

When our local mall’s interior surfaces are covered with a covering of seamless flat panel displays, the addition of a camera and thermometer recording outside a store will enable shop owners to adapt their decor to attract clients!

Shop owners would like to preserve the visual unity of their brand, but at the same time could:

1. adapt the perceived ‘coolness’ or ‘warmth’ of their shopping environment to the outside temperature.
2. adapt the colour saturation of their store to it a sense of continuity with the outside environment.
3. adapt the brightness of the store to minimise eye dilation adaptation for shoppers
4. adapt the color palette used by their store in response to the colour palettes used by surrounding stores.

From the perspective of shop owners this capacity is no doubt appealing, at the same time, though I will not be able to walk through
malls like that without feeling manipulated! I am not the only one thinking about the implications of this technology. The Interactive Architecture Organisation is a good place to visit to explore this theme more.

STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming has a great piece about the promise of a uniform model of computation based on arbitrary decomposition to the internet. On p32 they say:

Part of the solution to “an Internet all the way down” has interesting conflicts with today’s hardware and we are curious to see just how far this can be taken without having to posit a different (but pretty minimal) set of machinery to help out. Basically, we would like to make a distributed object system that is (a) so protected that it can allow completely foreign objects to be brought in from elsewhere without causing harm, and (b) so efficient that a much higher level of abstract communication can be used between objects (perhaps an advanced form of “publish and subscribe” or “forward inferencing using knowledge patterns”).

One of the central observations underlying RDBC (and Hypertext Computing) is just this idea of the Internet All the Way Down!