Douglas Purdy

Information Liberation Movement

with 5 comments

Context:  Liberate your data…

Jon calls it “hosted life bits“.  I call it “Infobus“. 

Whatever you call it, it is your data and it should be liberated from the tryanny of the infohole (my term for a system that takes in information, but only let’s it out on its terms).

So how do you combat an infohole?

You need four things: Principles, Scenarios, Architecture, Bits.

The rest of this post is brainstorm about principles…

your data =  digitial information that you hold the copyright for &| digitial information you have purchased &| digitial information that you have licensed, giving you certain rights of use and reproduction.

I am sure that I need an attorney to correct the above, but it makes sense in my happy little head, so let’s move on to the principles:

  1. You own your data.
  2. You determine where and how it is stored.
  3. You may share (licence for use) your data with any individual or group across the world using standard Internet technologies.
  4. You determine if/when/how this data is accessed, the terms of use and the revocation of the license.
  5. Only you may destroy your data.
  6. You should not need to license your data to any individual or group to achieve the above.
  7. You should not need to give up any “abilities” (searchablity, etc) to achieve the above.

I tried to stay broad here on purpose to capture the essense of the principles, but I am open to more (or more importantly less)…

March 6th, 2009 at 9:32 am

Posted in Philosophy, Software Development

5 Responses to 'Information Liberation Movement'

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  1. [...] Hosted lifebits meets infobus Posted by Jon Udell under Uncategorized   Doug Purdy is thinking out loud about the principles, scenarios, architecture, and software necessary for what he calls infobus and [...]

  2. I’ve been intrigued by Jon’s LifeBits ideas and this is certainly interesting, too. One question that comes to my mind is, how do you define an “infohole”, or perhaps more usefully, how do you define what isn’t an “infohole”. At some point it seems like there is a natural tendency for centralization of your “your data” or your lifebits. But what would constitute an acceptable platform or service for such a centralization? Open data standards and policies?

    Mitch

    Mitch Garnaat

    6 Mar 09 at 16:37

  3. Uh, Doug, they already did this. It’s called the GPL :-)

    Tom

    6 Mar 09 at 23:12

  4. [...] Purdy is thinking out loud about the principles, scenarios, architecture, and software necessary for what he calls infobus and [...]

  5. [...] protocol like this is a prerequisite for the broader “Infobus” and “Information Liberation” vision that I often talk [...]

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