Life & Research Notes

Generally I am a big proponent of preemptive transparency and honesty. It may not always be an immediately advantageous strategy, but in the long run it’s an approach that connects me to others who feel and act the same way, and those connections lead to lasting, rich exchanges. It’s my strategy for friendship, and I intend for it to be my professional strategy too.

That said, it’s not necessarily easy to implement in practice. One thing about having a blog like this is that people know things about me without me specifically telling them anything. How much of my personal life stories and thoughts do I really want to mix in with my work? And conversely, how much of my work can/should I justifiably talk about here? My previous situation at the lab had few boundaries between work and personal life, so it was fine to have everything mix into one soup. But now I’m finding it harder to reconcile the two worlds, and the pool of immediately interesting material seems to have shrunk.

No doubt I’ll leave public everything I’ve posted the past year and a half, and I do intend to keep writing. I just need to redefine the goals of this journal. This is new territory here, figuring out how to thread digital identity into the ongoing changes of real life.

This thesis envisions the future of trust and social commitment in a highly connected society. Starting with a distributed, democratized labor force and economies of efficient niche production and consumption, we predict radical shifts in the meaning and methods of commitment and the institutions of trust. The central experiment of this thesis is Promiserver, a web-based service and toolset for creation of lightweight contracts—dubbed promises—that are written as code. The service decouples commitment logic from specific applications, providing a generalized tool and forum for dynamic creation, binding, and evaluation of promises. The goal of Promiserver is to facilitate new models of collaboration by offering a sensible, lightweight, and agile promise system as an alternative to traditionally heavy legal commitments.

Promiserver: Procedurally Executed, Socially Enforced Microcontracts
(100 pages, 12MB PDF)

Good friend and PLW alum Burak Arikan posted a comment with some interesting questions and observations about Promiserver. I’m on full thesis mode today, and these issues are very much in line with what I’m thinking about.

1. So far promiserver people tend to write promises for themselves alone. Why do you think this happens? What would make people focus on writing contracts among themselves and other people?

This is a good, open question. It may be simply the terminology “promise” makes people think that if they write it, they are the participant. This has been a confusing point for almost everyone I’ve tested this with. A few reviewers were very confused about why they needed to put anyone in the promise at all. I don’t have any solid answers here. People may also be timid about publicly asking other people do things. I also think no one really even knows what sorts of promises to make.

2. When does promiserver evaluates/runs a promise? I see the Audit Trail evaluation list. But It is not clear what is the order or logic for these evaluations?

It evaluates active (signed by all participants) promises every 5 minutes, and also every time values are updated. Every value update is also logged, though this part of the audit trail is not yet visible.

3. I think promiserver needs ultra-light remote interfaces for entering / updating values in the contracts. This might be SMS interfaces, email commands etc.

I agree. I was working on the API for this yesterday. It is close, I just have some authentication/permissions issues. I probably won’t have time to work on it again until mid-May. Once there is a simple REST API then other interfaces can follow (widgets, email, physical/sensors, etc).

Thanks again to Burak and everyone else playing with this thing. Sorry the system still has a few bugs here and there, but we’ll work ‘em out. It’s been so rewarding seeing you all make your accounts and test it out. It is motivating me to finish writing.

And special props to Carlos Rocha for his random promise. So awesome.