Mini Resume Card for Conference Season
Between the business of the March/April conference season and leaving Blackphone, I’ve run out of business cards. Rather than rush to print a bunch of new ...
Between the business of the March/April conference season and leaving Blackphone, I’ve run out of business cards. Rather than rush to print a bunch of new ...
I don’t like forwarding negative topics on social networks such as Facebook, largely because of an internal intuition that has since been confirmed scientifi...
I consider one of my missions in life to be to “create tools that allow people to communicate about complexity”. There are many problems to address and many...
I often speak about “Freedom to Fail” as an essential element of success for all sizes of systems and processes such as a hackathons, ecosystems, corporate c...
One of my “Digital Influence” students at Pinchot.edu asked me about my thoughts regarding this video.
I recently ran into a quote that rang true to me. It is from Bill Gates in “The Road Ahead”, but is wise enough that it may have older origins than that:
On the topic of the #sharingeconomy, these audio podcast and video entries from “The Really Big Questions” that ask the question “Why Do People Share” are ...
I like this meme. I hope that positive changes to attitudes about trust is a true cultural shift.
For the second time, I was asked to play a hand pan solo on stage at the BGIedu intensive. This time I was better prepared to make a better quality recording.
Regarding the Heartbleed bug, SSL and TLS vendors used to require code security reviews before CAs would accept certificate requests from that implementation.
Matt Taylor Photo In the late 80’s I met Matt Taylor at a Mac user group event, and we became friends. We eventually became reciprocal apprentices — he learn...
Today is Blog Action Day, where each year a topic is chosen and bloggers and activists worldwide write about that topic in their blogs or post about it on T...
Motivated reasoning, social influence: simplicity, perceived self-interest, incongruity, confidence, empathy
One of the common practices in the independent movie industry is to share favors to keep production costs low. I loan you use of a camera and you later do so...
I was going through my first blog posts, and rediscovered a quote from 2003 Game Designer and Pundit Greg Costikyan from his blog Games * Design * Art * Cult...
Late this evening while catching up on my feeds, I saw for the first time that this year’s Blog Action Day is on the topic of Climate Change. This event is s...
Last year I participated in a survey followed up by a focus group on the topic of Noncommercial Use, in particular around the context that about 2/3rds of t...
This blog has been quiet lately as I’ve been doing a lot of work in the last year on the iPhone. I’ve been speaking at conferences like eComm 2008 (presentat...
Geert Hofstede™ Cultural Dimensions
I will be speaking tonight at WikiWednesday on the topic of Same Time, Different Place Editing, and will be demonstrating SynchroEdit integration with MediaW...
For the last several months I’ve been working on a new open source project that I’ve been calling SynchroEdit. SynchroEdit is a browser-based simultaneous mu...
In yesterday’s All Things Considered, NPR commentator Jake Halpern questions why you feel like you have a relationship with the characters in your favorite T...
Extrapolate To infer an unknown from something that is known; conjecture. -- The Random House College Dictionary
If you read my blog through an aggregator, you may not have noticed my new sidebar “Recent Bookmarks”. It is a list of web pages that I’ve found interesting ...
Shannon Appelcline, my colleague at Skotos (an online game company that I founded in 1999), has been writing for several years a sometimes weekly, sometimes ...
I’m a keynote speaker for the FVHA (Future of Voluntary Health Associations) Conference in Atlanta today. My job is to give to this community a gentle introd...
As a former Macintosh developer, I’ve always been disappointed with the user-interface of web pages. The state of the art of UI design moved backwards with t...
Joe Kraus, one of the co-founders of Excite, and new blogger has long been rumored to be working on a new wiki tool. Today at the Web 2.0 conference Joe fin...
I’m a sucker for great user-interface design ideas, especially if they succeed with what typically has poor UI design – web pages.
I keep an eye out for new ideas in Wiki technology (see my post from February Looking at Wiki), and I recently became fascinated by TiddlyWiki. It is sort of...
This is not a political blog, but like most bloggers I’ve been indundated with various discussions about the Bush Administration, Michael Moore, Red vs. Blue...
In my review last January of the amazing Seven Fingers of the Hand Circus I talk about why I like circuses that are more raw and intimate, i.e. more “human” ...
I have for some time told people that one way that my blog was different was because I was focused on offering a high signal-to-noise ratio. I told them that...
I have been leading the design of a new Open Source collaboration tool called EditThisPagePHP, which started six months ago and now is in beta.
As I’m studying social network software right now, I consider it my job to try many of the hundred some odd social networks out there right now.
A fascinating series of blog entries shows the promise and peril of social software and Blogs as a medium in a male-dominated technocracy:
Another Orkut user and I have confirmed a privacy hole in Orkut whenever you send a message to someone via Orkut.
In the last few weeks I’ve gotten more invitations to friends via Orkut then I have from all the other social networks I’ve tried out. I currently have 61 fr...
For the last few weeks I’ve been moving my blog from Blogger Pro over to the TypePad service, after a frustrating try to get WordPress to work. While I was a...
I had a nice relaxing five day holiday – good to get the creative juices flowing again.
At a recent unofficial gathering of Future Salon’ers, there was a discussion about a demonstration of four robots doing a japanese fan dance to music (I thin...
Yesterday I watched the amazing Seven Fingers of the Hand Circus. There were parts of it that were so beautiful and meaningful that I cried.
I’ve been working today on understand the Design Pattern Language behind the Wiki concept. I’ve been making some postings at the Meatball Wiki site on this t...
Joi Ito’s Web: Blogger’s block, collapsing facets and the number 150 offers some insights on two different topics:
I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months.
InfoWorld has an article by Ephraim Schwartz called “Social Networking Targets the Enterprise” that says that corporations are looking to use social networki...
The Social Software Weblog discusses DragonVenture Invests in Social Networking Platform in China:
I’ve been interested for several years in the ability of “player-generated content” to create niche or small multiplayer online games, at a company I’ve inve...
I have been working the last couple of weeks on a business plan idea for a company tenatively called eVentor:
A followup to my post yesterday Social Software – Problems & the Definition of “Friends”, I saw in Scott Lofteness’ blog a reference to David Hornick’s V...
In September I signed up for Vonage, a VoIP (Voice-over-IP) service that using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) that allows you to connect using the net to ...
I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months.
I’ve been playing around with a number of so-called Social Software/Social Networking sites for about six months. I’m currently on Ryze with supposedly 13 ‘...
Stuart Henshal recommended that I try out w.Bloggar for creating blog posts. I’m giving it a try here. So far seems interesting – in addition to spell check...
As a user-interface designer in the 80’s for companies like Apple Computer, and as old ‘groupware’ professional in the early 90’s, I’ve been quite disappoint...
I’m fascinated by the melding of various ethic music styles with contemporary music, in particular, when the mix includes some middle-eastern or central-euro...
A very interesting article that has a different take on why the tussle of people who file share vs. the Music Industry. What I like is that it is taking a “b...
I have been experimenting with eLance, which is a source of contractors for various web, graphic, and business related projects. So far I’ve put out bids for...
I have been working on some code for experimenting with some of my ideas regarding the future of wiki’s, at EditThisPagePHP which is hosted at SourceForge.
RSS is finally available to Blogger members, so as soon as I’ve figured it out I’ll be adding it here.
Game Designer and Pundit Greg Costikyan: wrote in his blog a thought I can’t believe that I’ve not heard of before, it makes so much sense. But it is new to ...
Stuart Henshall has been investigating for a while the use of converencing software (iChat, Skype, etc.) for use with business. I thought this advertisement ...
I have been hesitating on committing to Blogger because ever time I check into availability of Blogger Pro, it was not available. Apparently now Blogger Pro ...
Scott McCloud, a very smart comic book artist and author of the fantastic book “Understanding Comics” has been trying for a number of years to both reinvent ...
I decided after years of reading blogs that it was time to start blogging.
I recently wrote about “How My Values Inform Design”. There I discussed the issue of autonomy and how it can be supported by progressive trust, proof against...
ABSTRACT: By grounding technical decisions in ethical values, we can create compassionate digital architectures. This article examines how core human valu...
Progressive Trust—it sounds a bit like something from a relationship advice column, right? But in the world of digital interactions, it’s actually a revoluti...
This topic was presented at IIWXXXIX Fall 2024 on October 29, 2024. My name is Christopher Allen. In 2016, in advance of the ID2020 conference at the Unit...
I regularly post all of my “Musings of a Trust Architect” to both here and Blockchain Commons, but other posts at Blockchain Commons may be of interest as we...
Digital communities are collections of individual entities that are connected together. They can be modeled as graphs, with the individuals being nodes and t...
Since the mid-1990s, I’ve been advocating for the creation of secure digital infrastructures that protect human rights, civil liberties, and human dignity on...
ABSTRACT: Minimum Viable Architecture (MVA) is an alternative to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach, emphasizing the importance of a robust, scalable,...
This article, like “Echoes from History: Designing Self-Sovereign Identity with Care”, is drawn from a book I have in process called FOREMEMBRANCE, which c...
This article was originally published as an advance reading for RWOT12 in Köln, Germany on August 9, 2023. It has been slightly edited for this reprint. ...
ABSTRACT: Schnorr signatures have been a long time coming, but now that they’re finally here, they open up broad new cryptographic frontiers, including the i...
ABSTRACT: The principles of least privilege and least authority are core computer security principles that can minimize attacks. Not only can they be exte...
ABSTRACT: Self-Sovereign Computing is a transformative paradigm designed to empower individuals to take command of their digital journey and to uphold t...
ABSTRACT: The idea of Self-Sovereign Identity emerged in 2016, but it has inspirations dating back centuries. This article explores the historic evolution...
ABSTRACT: Drawing inspiration from Ken Thompson’s seminal work, Reflections on Trusting Trust, there are deep-rooted challenges in establishing trust in c...
ABSTRACT: Cryptographic agility was once seen as a desirable goal for computer security, but increasingly problems such as high costs, bad interactions, a...
I have been struggling for a while to communicate my framing of definitions for Data Minimization and Selective Disclosure, which are privacy-focused data-pr...
A New Approach to Building Trust in Decentralized Systems Musings of a Trust Architect is a series of articles by Life with Alacrity author and Blockchain C...
UPDATE 2023-02-16: This bill has passed the Wyoming Assembly 41-13, a day after the Wyoming Senate passed it by a vote of 31-0. If Wyoming Governor Mark Gord...
This summer, we’ve been iterating through an article intended to talk about the success that Blockchain Commons has had working with the Wyoming legislature ...
ABSTRACT: On April 26, 2016, Christopher released “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity”, a foundational article on SSI. Five years on, self-sovereign iden...
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline ABSTRACT Technologies like the Web of Trust and PKI lay the foundation for identity on the internet: they ma...
Today I head out to a month-long series of events associated with identity: I’m starting with the 22st (!) Internet Identity Workshop next week; then I’m sp...
A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools by Christopher Allen. Defining “Participatory Ecosystem” — Grow the P...
A Revised “Ostrom’s Design Principles for Collective Governance of the Commons” The traditional economic definition of “the commons” are those resources th...
(This article has been cross-posted in Medium) Ssh by Katie Tegtmeyer CC-BY (crop2)
In 2009, Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economics for her “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”.
(By Christopher Allen with Elyn Andersson and Shannon Appelcline) Two years ago, the Bainbridge Graduate Institute (www.BGI.edu) faculty gathered to radic...
These are the initial required readings for the first two weeks of my Using the Social Web for Social Change class (hashtag #SW4SX) that I teach in the MBA i...
This fall with be the 4th year, and the 5th time that I’ve taught the class Using the Social Web for Social Change (hashtag #SW4SX) in the MBA in Sustainable...
Over my lifetime I have encountered a number of “tools for ignition” — a phrase which I use to describe innovative products that have empowered people and cr...
I am a lifetime entrepreneur. Even when working for large organizations I find my approach to be entrepreneurial (what my mentor Gifford Pinchot would call I...
With Google+ almost two weeks into its test phase, conversation about this new social network service seems to be going in circles.
I was musing as I was preparing for next week’s Intensive at BGI that I have 21 students in my class, an uncomfortable size. That’s because it lies between...
Passwords are very important for maintaining your online identity, because they ensure that no one else can access your accounts and do things that you would...
We live in a world of conversation, of language; all full of words. Mastery of language requires learning the meanings of thousands of words. The average na...
In my first article in this series I talked about community numbers: how the sizes of groups ultimately affect their success (or failure). However what I dis...
In my previous post, I talked about the limits on sizes of tightly-knit communities. These group limits are closely related to a number of interesting person...
We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Althou...
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
My colleague, Shannon Appelcline, has been working on a game rating system for RPGnet. This has resulted in real-world application of the principles for desi...
In Collective Choice: Rating Systems I discuss ratings scales of various sorts, from eBay’s 3-point scale to RPGnet’s double 5-point scale, and BoardGame Gee...
I’ve been a moderator/host/forum leader for various bulletin boards and other online communities since the early 1980s; first on CompuServe, later on GEnie...
In the last month or so I’ve received a number of links to Life With Alacrity as a venture capital blog, and to myself as a venture capitalist.
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline
There is some more excellent research this week by Nick Yee and Nicolas Ducheneaut in the PlayOn blog. Again, their research provides good insight into socia...
In my initial blog entry on the Dunbar Number I presented some statistics on group sizes based on the online game Ultimata Online. In it you could clearly se...
By Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline [This is the second of a series of articles on collective choice, co-written by my collegue Shannon Appelclin...
I’ve been working on an ambitious list of topics that I’d like to cover over the next year. I offer them to you here so you can have some idea the areas that...
In my post about the Dunbar Number I offered some evidence on the levels of satisfaction of various group sizes based on some empirical data from online game...
As someone who now has over 171 professional “connections” in my LinkedIn Profile, 198 “friends” on Orkut, many more non-intersecting friends and acquaintan...
The term ‘social software’, which is now used to define software that supports group interaction, has only become relatively popular within the last two or ...
A number of my posts have been about integrating different domains of knowledge in order to better understand how human behavior should be incorporated in th...
I believe that as we evolve social software to better serve our needs and the needs of the groups that we are involved in, we need to figure out how to apply...
I’ve been thinking about the nature of privacy a lot lately.
While I’ve been out attending the SXSW Music, Movie and Interactive Conference there has been a flurry of high-quality postings about Social Networking.
Lately I’ve been noticing the spread of a meme regarding “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 that I believe is misunderstanding of his ideas.
As I head out next week to the RSA Conference I realized that it has been 13 years since I attended the first one. I remember fondly the potential and power ...
While at eTech, I attended a number of “social software” sessions. One thing I heard was a persistent call from folk like Marc Canter for all the vendors to ...
I’ve not just been spending time looking at social networking services, I’ve also been digging deeper into wiki. I’ve still got more to go, but some of these...
I have now had CEOs of three different social networks send me emails asking me to compare Orkut to their service. I’ve not had a chance to dig deeply into g...
I’ve read of emails, Orkut messages, and blog postings since my post yesterday, so I thought I would share some with you.
Like many others, I’ve been paying attention to Orkut in the last couple of weeks. I’ve answered more requests to be “friends” on Orkut then I have of any of...
I’ve received a number of replies and pointers after posting my Evaluating Social Network Services here last Tuesday. Here are a few:
After a week where I met a number of bloggers and social network / social software people, I decided to try to update my various networks at Ryze, Tribe.Net,...
I am hosting on Saturday May 10th a 6-hour “Playshop” as an introduction to the Group Works Deck and the Group Pattern Language. This will be on Saturday o...
Starting next week I will be teaching a course at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute on the topic of “Using the Social Web for Social Change”.
I will be speaking next Tuesday (July 11th) at the monthly meeting of BayCHI, the San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of ACM SIGCHI (Computer Human Interface Spe...
I was reading on Slashdot a discussion about iTune 4.8 and its new capability to purchase videos from the iTunes Music Store, when I read two things that jus...
I spent most of last week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
socialmedia
General Advice about the Heartbleed Bug in SSL
Advice to SysAdmins & Managers about Heartbleed Bug in SSL
Danah Boyd asks “Is Oculis Rift Sexist”?
To be persuasive, you need to understand “Identity Protective Cognition”
World Backup Day
Good Advice from “A Modern Designer’s Canvas”
How to Hold an Unpopular Opinion
Justine Musk says “If you don’t tell your story, someone else will tell it for you.”
Countries Learning to Manipulate Social Media
Washington Post says US tried to create a “Cuban Twitter”
Seattle’s Reaction to Sharing Economy Should Be Better
A Story of a Great Teacher
Second Gov & The Consensus Project
“Forward Casting” Trust Services from 1988