Life & Research Notes

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)

I’ve been ready for this warm weather. I’ve been sleeping with my window open lately, which has been great. Tonight, for the first time this year, I got home and opened my back window to hear the sound of my neighbors’ air conditioners. While I actually don’t mind it being 73 out and a little humid, it sounds like others do. I guess I can put up with a little hum, though personally I’ve generally been happier to be a little warm with quiet.

With the sunshine comes relaxation. I’m shedding my winter and springtime worries, handing over theses for signatures, and feeling a little more comfortable. It’s hard to distinguish where the sun and warm breezes end and where my own reemerging sense of satisfaction begins.

I have a structurally complete version of my thesis now, and I’m just waiting to work on revisions based on feedback from my readers, John, Hiroshi Ishii and ML alum Brent Britton. Though I know I have some more work to straighten it up, and the deadline is coming right up this Friday, it feels really good to have all the parts in place.

The other news is that I resuscitated OPENSTUDIO today, putting it on our newer server, which also involved switching it to apache2.2 and mongrel cluster instead of fastcgi, and setting up Postgres and PHP, plus some Tomcat fiddling. Way too many technologies happening in that project.