Life & Research Notes

This is thesis time. I’m going to have to buckle down and crank out some code, then some writing. I figure if I start writing in March with an aim to have my drafts for readers by mid-April (wishful thinking?), I’ll need to produce two pages a day, every day. So I’m going to have to focus. This means:

1. Stay human by going to bed and waking up early.
2. Exercise regularly, at least 3+ times a week. I should have gone today. I will go tomorrow.
3. Take strategic breaks to let my brain cool off. Watch movies and read.
4. Stay connected with Jenn.

I’m laying it down here and now.

Well the year anniversary of this blog came and went, and I didn’t make it to my pledge of one hundred entries. I have ninety one, which averages out to about one every four days. Sounds about right.

And it’s fine that I didn’t quite squeeze in those extra nine, because I’ve been busily immersed in actually (finally) building Promiserver, designing and implementing the core interactions. It’s not easy creating alternative populist contract systems. It has to be usable and understandable for, well, everyone. Along the way I’m also including a decent REST interface for promises, hopefully making this system decent mashup fodder.

For my Hacking Second Life project I was interested in the trails of data each Second Life resident inadvertently generates without any awareness or control of its usage. While content creators in Second Life have some control over the licensing of their work, how do we navigate and manage the digital content created simply as a result of ‘living’ in a purely digital world in which our speech, gestures and actions are made of the same stuff as our code, clothes and cars? How do we decide whether others use this content? Can we set up personal license policies for our personal data?

To begin thinking about these issues, I wrote a small script that may be attached to any object, and that sends all locally overheard chat to a “Permanent Record” web application via an HTTP post. On the web, visitors may then view a list of the names and unique keys of all people recorded and all listening devices, and can view a live updating audit of all chat.

The site acts as a real time observation post of all conversations taking place within range of any of the listeners, revealing speaker identity, content, location and time. Check out the screenshot and screencast (24MB) of the permanent record and recorder in action.

I plan to put up a more permanent version of the site as soon as possible, and I’ll install a few listeners around some MIT or Media Lab sanctioned land. I’ve been tempted to attach the script to a variety of different types of objects, especially projectiles so I could launch them towards interesting things happening. It would be interesting to have these things distributed all over the place, though at some point I’d probably be violating the Linden Lab ToS.

Luis and I tested out the recorder a little…

Unfortunately he felt compelled to sit on it.

Check out the LSL source code. If nothing else, it at least has some generalized little functions for sending RESTful HTTP posts. Since Second Life only allows 20 HTTP requests per 100 seconds, my code queues up overheard statements and sends them in batches.

Promiserver provides online services and APIs to facilitate trustworthy, meaningful collaboration and commerce. It represents these relationships as informal contracts, referred to as promises. Promises are socially constructed, community enforced, and procedurally executed. The project aims to offer a sensible, lightweight promise network as an alternative to heavy and inefficient legal commitments, and to facilitate new models of collaborative business by reducing transaction costs and improving market fluidity. This work grows out of OPENSTUDIO’s open transaction microeconomy and p2p commissioning.

Promiserver Thesis Proposal Draft (PDF)

Raph Koster, author of Theory of Fun which we read in Henry’s class, has a short, thoughtful piece on the economic and social effects of CopyBot, a hack on Second Life that allows people to duplicate any object. His conclusion is in line with some of the discussion lately here in the PLW:

Microtransactions for digital assets and virtual goods is a rising, potentially multibillion dollar industry. To succeed, entrepreneurs who are building networked systems based on user content . . . must realize that anything displayable is copyable; the value lies instead in service and in server-side functionality. Content is like songs around a campfire: destined to be enjoyed for free. Those who build businesses around hosting campfires would be wise to focus on making the campfire experience great, rather than charging listeners by the song. (full article)

In designing OPENSTUDIO we’ve experimented with simple models for small transactions trading in digital content, and to a lesser extent with the same for exchange of services. On the content side we’ve found ourselves wandering into the territory of DRM, licenses, creative commons, and participatory media. These are all relevant data points in a struggle to understand how to define ownership of digital media that is both effortlessly copyable yet paradoxically often fleeting and ephemeral.

I’m working in contracts as an attempt to understand the service side, to decouple services from any specific economic systems, communities, mediums, or infrastructures, and to create the standalone endpoint at which people come together to create and bind themselves to their own lightweight, private laws written in the community’s own vernacular. If the term microtransaction refers to mini-payments, then let’s claim the term microcontract to describe these mini-agreements. While media companies should follow Koster’s advice and try to make their campfires comfy, I’m happy to wander among the fireflies.

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.

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.