Life & Research Notes

Should this new style contract be a program that participants agree to execute and that runs until succeeding or failing? Or is it a collection of values continually evaluated by a function that returns the state of the contract?

The latter seems more straightforward, both in implementation and usability. The parameters could be any number of values: time, account balance, user input, results of web service calls, or even sensor values. The evaluation function then returns the status of the contract: In Progress, Breached, or Completed. It is also easy enough to record the history of the values each time they are evaluated, making it possible to create tracebacks that connect value changes (stock price, missing a deadline, pushing a button) to contract success or failure.

The evaluation function could be created without code, perhaps with an interface along the lines of filter tools in mail clients. Rather than evaluating incoming emails based on their characteristics, we evaluate contracts based on their state values.

The internet accelerates the pace of life and business. It promotes rapid communication and interaction. Each such interaction requires a contractual arrangement, some handshake that, figurative or literal, communicates and commits to the terms of the relationship. From social networks to licenses to finance, and among and between both people and businesses, the web of these handshakes grows dense and tangled. It is this fundamental handshake that I wish to examine and redesign in this thesis.

What a minimal amount of work to switch OPENSTUDIO to public membership! All the code and infrastructure was in place, and it was a matter of just flipping the switch. I made most of the changes yesterday while sitting in the back of John’s class. This morning I updated the site and announced the new policy on the OS blog.

With the original invitation requirement, OPENSTUDIO’s barrier to entry was very high because people could only join the community via invitation from an existing member. Each new member was socially connected to the PLW by an unbroken chain of invitations, each link in the chain offering a property of transitive accountability. Though superficially a small change, open public membership effectively lowers this barrier one very important notch; suddenly we are allowing anonymous, totally unknown users, with no connection to anyone, and no inviter whose reputation is at stake. How will the community develop without the imposed connections? Of course these unconnected users may in turn invite others, potentially leading to more fragmented subcommunities, Chris Anderson’s “tribal eddies.” How will these new dynamics affect the site’s content, the character and quality of the drawings, tags, commissions and transactions?

Of course all these ponderings are meaningless if no one bothers to join. Is there any life left in OPENSTUDIO one year after launch, or are participatory media and virtual microeconomies too mainstream for people to take notice of this funky little art site that’s been humming along in its own little dreamworld? We’ll find out.